Never heard of it.
Back in the late 80's Portugal it was either Borland or Microsoft for MS-DOS, eventually we also became aware of Watcom, Metaware and Symantec.
The Power C Compiler
31–40 of 77 posts
Re: The Power C Compiler
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I seem to recall that the free compilers from MS have (or used to have) limitations in the license about commercial use. If you use it for a popular product they may want money from you.
Re: The Power C Compiler
#33Earlier 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,…
The other thing I remember about 80's compilers is a lot of the vendors wanted to drink your milkshake too. They had licensing fees for every unit you shipped. Basically meaning they wanted a cut of your gross revenue.
Re: The Power C Compiler
#34I cringe when I look at this. Everything was sooooo primitive back then! We've become spoiled with programming languages like Rust, C# and Python, almost all of which are free to use.
Except for the fact that I was 30 odd years younger and had a beautiful girlfriend, I don't long back for those times.
Re: The Power C Compiler
#35The 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…
Maybe the compiler didn't implement the HUGE memory model, only the LARGE memory model? https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20200728-00/?p=10... has an overview that appears to match what I remember from those times.
Re: The Power C Compiler
#36That looks like the Go logo. Did the Go creators reuse one of the C logos? (Yes yes, Unix lineage)
Nope, first they started with Gopher that was based on Glenda.
https://9p.io/plan9/glenda.html
Then because it wasn't deemed professional enough, a marketing campaign was created for the current logo.
Re: The Power C Compiler
#37Earlier 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.
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.
Around the mid 90's I bought the Dice C compiler for the Amiga. I think it came with a book(?) I was really happy with the price. It was on a special markdown price. I counted it as one of the best purchases I ever made. I was doing a PhD in Applied Mathematics at the time, nearly all in Fortran. But I was interested in C. It turned out that me learning C was a great decision as it led to me being a professional programmer.
I think the Amiga collapse not too long after I bought the compiler. Maybe the declining sales of the Amiga is what the authors decide to sell the compiler relatively cheaply. Matt Dillon wrote the compiler, and subsequently went on to create DragonFly BSD.
Re: The Power C Compiler
#38This 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.
Paying for compilers was very normal. In the early 80's I paid for the Realia COBOL compiler for MSDOS and paid for a screen library, ScreenIO, that generated full-screen (80 chars x 25 lines) applications. I had already written a film scheduling app for a client on a minicomputer and they were getting charged for time on the mini. Buying the PC and paying me $5K + annual maintenance was going to be cheaper than paying for minicomputer access.
I had to buy a dev PC: a PC-AT 286 with a toggle switch on the back that allowed it to run a 6MHz or 8MHz; a 60MB Priam hard drive - one of the fastest available; and I think it had 2MB of RAM, though of course you could only use 640K with the rest usable as a RAM disk or disk cache. I think it was around $2500. For reference, IBM's PC-AT system at the time (1984) was $4K-6K with a 20MB drive:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer/AT
The Realia compiler was something like $1200 and the screen library was around $450 I think. They're apparently still selling ScreenIO, though now for Windows:
http://www.screenio.com/purchase.htm
Computer Associates bought the Realia company, abandoned the product, and focused on porting mainframe COBOL applications to the PC.
I didn't make much on the initial deal, but charged $500/year for maintenance and they ran the thing for over 15 years. My main goal was to get a fast PC: I had been reading Byte and PC Magazine for a few months and this was a way to get one without me plunking down a lot of cash.
I think it's kinda cool that a small company like Realia (out of Chicago) could create something like this and have a functioning company for many years with paid employees. Yeah, open source is great in some areas, but in some ways it is not so great. A few geniuses could not have a sustainable compiler business these days, no matter how great the software.
Re: The Power C Compiler
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Around the mid 90's I bought the Dice C compiler for the Amiga. I think it came with a book(?) I was really happy with the price. It was on a special markdown price. I counted it as one of the best purchases I ever made. I was doing a PhD in Applied Mathematics at the time, nearly all in Fortran. But I was interested in C. It turned out that me learning C was a great decision as it led to me being a professional prog…
Yes, I remember Dice! I believe there was also a free version, with limited features?
I still look upon my "Amiga years" fondly. I moved to Linux in late 1994...
Re: The Power C Compiler
#40> 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…
> Wow what was the utility of BCD for these applications?
In financial spaces I used BCD extensively. Especially on embedded. IIRC, most of the older banking messages used BCD as well (card acquirer -> card issuer messages).