The Power C Compiler • Hacker News Board

Re: The Power C Compiler

#21

Post by cat_plus_plus » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 5:47 PM UTC

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.

You get what you pay for, for example an actual printed book explaining the product in detail. What will one get with an $0.99 mobile app today?

Re: The Power C Compiler

#22

Post by krylon » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 6:02 PM UTC

asveikau wrote: post #12

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 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 a…

I remember reading a blog post years ago (don't remember where or by whom, unfortunately) that claimed the compiler market was also eroded from the other end - many small-ish companies building compilers were acqui-hired by large companies trying to improve the performance of their RDBMS, so the compilers those companies produced often ended up as roadkill, or if lucky, were open-sourced (think OpenWatcom).

But maybe it just turned out the real money is in the tools - you can get all of Microsoft's compilers for free, but they still charge you big $$$ for Visual Studio, and lots of developers apparently are happy to pay that price. Intel still charge big bucks for their compiler, but I have no idea how widely used it actually is or what Intel's thinking is.

Re: The Power C Compiler

#23

Post by rwmj » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 6:34 PM UTC

The first C compiler I used! I found a bug where if you allocated arrays larger than 64K (using far pointers of course) accesses would wrap around at 64K. I guess they didn't implement far pointers correctly. Anyway I sent them a bug report with a reproducer as a typed letter -- from the UK to the US -- including an international reply coupon[1], and they were kind enough to send me an update to the newer version on a 5.25" floppy. It fixed the problem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_reply_coupon

Re: The Power C Compiler

#24

Post by judojava » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 6:41 PM UTC

The goodness was actually the book. The writing was simple and clear, the examples were self-contained and practical. It was a perfect textbook. Many years ago I gave my tattered copy to a second-cousin when he was about 15 and it totally changed his life; he became a coder and never looked back.

Re: The Power C Compiler

#25

Post by rwmj » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 6:44 PM UTC

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #9

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.

It was just the way things were back then. Compilers were expensive too. In the late 80s I saved up my allowance money for months to buy a Modula-2 compiler for my Atari ST. I still remember reading the manual on my way home from the city, floppies in hand. In the 80s there was a vibrant shareware & public domain scene, but 'open source' wasn't nearly what it is today, and shareware & PD things were mostly utilities,…

To be fair, this particular compiler was relatively cheap. The number £30 springs to mind (which included the book), but I'm not sure if that was the price or just my faulty memory. The internet wasn't a thing for home users in 1989.

Only a couple of years later I had access to the internet and was downloading DJGPP. Fun fact is I now work with DJ.

Re: The Power C Compiler

#26

Post by icedchai » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 6:45 PM UTC

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.

This was very common. I remember asking my parents to buy me a C compiler for Christmas, back in the early 90's. (Lattice C on the Amiga. It later became SAS/C!)

I think it was at least half a dozen floppies. It also came with a huge set of documentation.

Re: The Power C Compiler

#27

Post by cowmix » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 6:46 PM UTC

whartung wrote: post #19

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.

The little ISP I started back in '93 used the Mix DB for our accounting system. We wrote a Perl lib for it (that was turned it into a client/server type architecture.) It was GREAT.

Re: The Power C Compiler

#28

Post by lelanthran » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 6:48 PM UTC

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.

> 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.

Nope. I have, right here on my desk somewhere[1], the CDROM for the Watcom C/C++ compiler that came with an IDE and the watcom assembler wasm. IIRC correctly, the IDE had a Vi mode and it came with a make that was much better than the nmake from Microsoft.

I remember buying it for a relatively large sum back in 1996 or so. I did not think it strange to pay money for a C and C++ compiler + assembler that allowed me to produce Windowed applications, device drivers and netware modules, that came with an IDE (with Vi-compatible bindings), as well as make.

There was tons and tons of documentation as well (Windows help files), more than I'd ever seen before in my life. It had enough documentation on that disk to take you from "Never used C++ before" to "expert C++ developer". It assumed that google and stackoverlflow did not exist, and so it answered any question you could possibly have had.

It also had samples for all the major things, so you could easily start a device driver project (for example) just by copying the samples.

Honestly, it seemed like great value for money to someone who had no internet.

Re: The Power C Compiler

#29

Post by grishka » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 6:52 PM UTC

racingmars wrote: post #17

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 operati…

Why would you ever want monetary amounts as fractions or any kind? Why would you want to separate dollars from cents? Just represent them in cents or other smallest units ($15.27 would be 1527), and only make the distinction between dollars and cents for human-readable output. Problem solved. I don't understand what BCD would solve here vs plain binary integers.

Re: The Power C Compiler

#30

Post by UltraViolence » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 6:53 PM UTC

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.

Maybe not for the compiler, but you pay though your nose for almost everything else!

Look at how Microsoft is pushing everyone to the Cloud, including desktops. All their developer products are wholly focused on pushing your workloads to Azure.