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The Power C Compiler

mixsoftware.com

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Re: The Power C Compiler

#11

Post by crazyideaman »

I just ran across my 3.5" disks for this along with some of the support tools! Finding this book in the mall bookstore and seeing the ad in the back was a revelation for me. Best $20 I ever spent.

I wanted to learn how to make .exe files but at the time had no resources or contacts on how to even start. This book and compiler was what launched my entire career.

It allowed you to do inline assembly as well which was a lot of fun on an old DOS machine. I'm pretty sure my brother and I hit every possible way to lock up the computer or have it spontaneously reboot since we didn't really understand memory management. Lots of fun trying to make video games and putting the vga card into Mode13 or ModeX as well. Good times.

Re: The Power C Compiler

#12

Post by asveikau »

NotCamelCase wrote: post #6
pseale wrote: post #2

This is like opening a time capsule and examining all the little details. Almost more interesting than the barebones, locked-in-time product page for a paid C compiler, is the locked-in-time cgi-bin-powered shopping cart page at http://www.safepay.net/cgi-bin/shop/cart.cgi?db=products.dat... (note it's an http link). There's a whole host of old-school relics here--it is truly a blast from the past: paying separately…

Having to pay for a compiler sounds a little funny through the lens of 2022; I wonder if the majority of people buying these software/packages at the time found the idea strange, too.

I don't think so. What I remember is that compilers and other developer tools were expensive and that was normal. Real "professional" tools but also beginner stuff like Visual Basic. Though as a teenager I remember pirating them.

Free software and open source did a lot to change that. GCC for example. Linux becoming popular also helped. Then as interpreted languages became popular, with perl, python, etc., all free and under permissive licenses. Java was free for personal use then with commercial licenses IIRC? Even Microsoft started having "express" editions or compiler-only without IDE. I'd say by the 2000s decade compilers were no longer a cash cow.

Re: The Power C Compiler

#14

Post by dekhn »

I may very well have used this in college some 30 years ago on a 286 DOS machine.

IIRC I managed to blow the stack with a recursive function 6 calls deep. Shortly after, I got a 486 and installed Linux (gcc worked much better)

Re: The Power C Compiler

#15

Post by hyperman1 »

NotCamelCase wrote: post #6
pseale wrote: post #2

This is like opening a time capsule and examining all the little details. Almost more interesting than the barebones, locked-in-time product page for a paid C compiler, is the locked-in-time cgi-bin-powered shopping cart page at http://www.safepay.net/cgi-bin/shop/cart.cgi?db=products.dat... (note it's an http link). There's a whole host of old-school relics here--it is truly a blast from the past: paying separately…

Having to pay for a compiler sounds a little funny through the lens of 2022; I wonder if the majority of people buying these software/packages at the time found the idea strange, too.

I bought it at the time, somewhere in the 1990's. No internet and no cell phones at that time. Buying a box with floppies or cd was normal, even for an OS or basic tooling. Open source was out of reach, I didn't even know about the existence of the concept.

It came with a thick book, the reference manual for all C functions. That book alone was worth paying for.

Mix C was not that great, it miscompiled stuff on a regular base. I debugged a problem for a day before finding out the compiler sometimes flat out ignored basic constructions like i++

One day I found out about djgpp, and even it cost me as much as Mix C in phone costs, I never looked back. Quality was so much better. Still used that reference book a long time, though.

Re: The Power C Compiler

#16

Post by Turing_Machine »

NotCamelCase wrote: post #6
pseale wrote: post #2

This is like opening a time capsule and examining all the little details. Almost more interesting than the barebones, locked-in-time product page for a paid C compiler, is the locked-in-time cgi-bin-powered shopping cart page at http://www.safepay.net/cgi-bin/shop/cart.cgi?db=products.dat... (note it's an http link). There's a whole host of old-school relics here--it is truly a blast from the past: paying separately…

Having to pay for a compiler sounds a little funny through the lens of 2022; I wonder if the majority of people buying these software/packages at the time found the idea strange, too.

Not at all. At the time, only people at universities and major tech companies had access to the net and what little free software existed.

The Borland and Microsoft compilers costs hundreds. Power C was a godsend to impoverished students, and as noted by others, the book alone was worth the price they were charging for the whole package. It was just outstanding.

While I did have access to the net, it was only over a 1200 bps dialup modem. Downloading something like gcc over that took...a while. The alternative was to bring a stack of floppy disks to school, and laboriously split anything big into chunks that would fit on a floppy.

I still remember when a friend of mine who worked for the university computer labs took the trouble of downloading all the floppies (> 20, IIRC) that let you work your way up to having a running version of this weird Finnish thing called "Linux" (the term "distro" didn't exist then). I got him to make me a set, and never looked back.

Even if you did have gcc, at that time it didn't support a lot of the stuff you needed to make professional-level MS-DOS software -- none of the graphics functions to build what passed for a decent UI at the time, no memory models (which sucked, big-time, but you needed to use and understand them), etc.

I still count Power C to be among the wisest purchases I ever made, along with a copy of K&R 1st edition. Between those two, you were golden.

This concludes this edition of crochety grandfather talking about "In my day". :-)

Re: The Power C Compiler

#17

Post by racingmars »

wyldfire wrote: post #7

> binary coded decimal floating point routines and financial functions for calculating the time value of money, depreciation, etc Wow what was the utility of BCD for these applications? My only experience with BCD is with RTCs. I always assumed that the RTCs had been designed for driving a simple display like 7-segment lcd. But doing floating point in BCD? I guess the 8087 wasn't common yet but maybe soft float using…

Financial calculations need to be done with fixed-point, not floating-point, arithmetic. Floating-point can't store the exact value of most fractional numbers, and especially over many transactions for many customers the floating-point errors will accumulate.

You need basic addition and subtraction to always be exact (e.g. $15.27 + $91.31 needs to come out as $106.58, not $106.5799999999999999999998), and for operations that may have remainders beyond your desired number of digit precision, you need deterministic rounding or other rules to handle it.

If you're ever writing any code that handles money, DO NOT use just naively use float and double types in your code!

Re: The Power C Compiler

#18

Post by hyperman1 »

wyldfire wrote: post #7

> binary coded decimal floating point routines and financial functions for calculating the time value of money, depreciation, etc Wow what was the utility of BCD for these applications? My only experience with BCD is with RTCs. I always assumed that the RTCs had been designed for driving a simple display like 7-segment lcd. But doing floating point in BCD? I guess the 8087 wasn't common yet but maybe soft float using…

Soft float was only available if your application was compiled with it, and dog slow in any case.

Fixed point was still common: Take an int and pretend the first X bits are after the point. You have to choose X wisely, so you have enough bits available both before and after the dot. This at a time when 16 bits was the common int size.

Re: The Power C Compiler

#19

Post by whartung »

I bought and used their Database Toolkit back in the day. Far more than adequate for the job at hand. I've looked, and it's actually hard to find just a simple B+Tree library out on the internets today.

Re: The Power C Compiler

#20

Post by readingnews »

hyperman1 wrote: post #15
NotCamelCase wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having to pay for a compiler sounds a little funny through the lens of 2022; I wonder if the majority of people buying these software/packages at the time found the idea strange, too.

I bought it at the time, somewhere in the 1990's. No internet and no cell phones at that time. Buying a box with floppies or cd was normal, even for an OS or basic tooling. Open source was out of reach, I didn't even know about the existence of the concept. It came with a thick book, the reference manual for all C functions. That book alone was worth paying for. Mix C was not that great, it miscompiled stuff on a reg…

I owned it also, and agree, the book was worth twice the asking price, must have kept that book for 10 years at least.
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