Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Power C Compiler

mixsoftware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 77 posts

Re: The Power C Compiler

#51

Post by badsectoracula »

mikewarot wrote: post #10
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.

Turbo Pascal was a bargain at $49 when it was introduced, and remained a bargain as the delay loops were removed from the compiler (according to rumor), and features were added. Delphi at $200 was still a good deal... then the price shot through the roof. Oh, and it had a REALLY good manual and online help.

> Delphi at $200 was still a good deal... then the price shot through the roof.

The cheapest non-upgrade version of Delphi was at $100 (you can find it on archive.org) and was that until Delphi 5 or so i think. Later they made that version to be for personal use only and (i think) upped the price for the next bracket and after that they made the personal version free - but only of Delphi 7. After that everything went crazy expensive, until Turbo Delphi, which IIRC had two versions, one free that allowed commercial use but didn't allow installing custom components and a "cheap" (compared to the other versions) $500 version that allowed it, but it was based on the most unstable version of Delphi ever and CodeGear killed it anyway. In recent times they have the "Starter"/"Community" free edition but the license requires that you only have something like $5k / year income, otherwise you must buy at least the next bracket that is around $1700 or so.

Funny how when the entire programming tools industry was going towards more accessible tools, Borland/CodeGear/Embarcadero went the complete opposite direction.

Re: The Power C Compiler

#52

Post by pjmlp »

mseepgood wrote: post #50
pjmlp wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. https://go.dev/blog/go-brand

The Gopher is the mascot, not the logo, always has been. The original Go logo was this: https://go.dev/blog/gopher/logo.png

> The circular shape of the letters hints at the eyes of the Go gopher, creating a familiar shape and allowing the mark and the mascot to pair well together.

Re: The Power C Compiler

#53

Post by astrange »

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…

“Financial functions for calculating the time value of money, depreciation etc” isn’t “handling money” and is perfectly fine to do in floating point. Essentially everyone out there does it in Excel or Python.

Re: The Power C Compiler

#54

Post by MontyCarloHall »

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…

This raises a host of other questions. Does Mix Software still exist? Their product catalog does not appear to be updated in the last ~20 years (owing to a Y2K compliance statement prominent on the front page), so unless they have a side business not listed on their website, it seems unlikely they’re still in business. Surely nobody’s still buying their compilers or training materials on VHS.

If they’re gone, who’s still paying the bill for hosting, and why? Just for fun to preserve a time capsule? Did they prepay for hosting for 30 years, and the site will disappear one day?

Re: The Power C Compiler

#55

Post by reitzensteinm »

rwmj wrote: post #23

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…

Glad they fixed your issue, but I wonder if they also had a stack of "closed: wontfix" postcards.

Re: The Power C Compiler

#56

Post by mid-kid »

rwmj wrote: post #23

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…

That sounds to me like the far pointer was used to set the segment number, and the pointer offset isn't added back to the segment number as that'd be slow. Sounds like a sensible implementation to me though of course it's unexpected

Re: The Power C Compiler

#57

Post by msbarnett »

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 wonder if the majority of people buying these software/packages at the time found the idea strange, too.

Not at all. Pretty much all software at the time was commercial or, at most, shareware. Pre-web, selling binaries to people to run on their computers was just how one made money as a software developer.

That professional tools in particular were fairly expensive software packages (CodeWarrior, a few years later, was several hundred dollars. Power C was dirt cheap at $20) seemed completely normal. A carpenter isn’t handed a full workshop worth of saws and chisels gratis, after all. If I wanted to be paid to make software, just as obviously the professionals who made the compiler did, too.

(it’s really difficult to convey how incredibly good all of the documentation and examples that came with some of these products were, too. Think C (back when symantec sold compilers and wasn’t a fourth-rate antivirus vendor) came with thousands of pages of physical manuals teaching you everything from the fundamentals of programming to exhaustively documenting their libraries, with wall charts of class hierarchies etc. Pre-internet this stuff was worth it’s weight in gold)

Re: The Power C Compiler

#58

Post by znpy »

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.

A while ago I watched a video on YouTube about a guy reviving an old rs6000 workstation from ibm, running aix, with the ultimate goal of running doom.

When it talks about compilers, the c/c++ compiler suite was price at like 4 k$… although supposed/allegedly (that is, according to ibm marketing) it won over 4x over gcc (in the performance of the generated code i guess).

Re: The Power C Compiler

#59

Post by weinzierl »

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 worked in automotive for a couple of years. They still spend a lot of money for certified C/C++ compilers.

Re: The Power C Compiler

#60

Post by Wuzado »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #54
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…

This raises a host of other questions. Does Mix Software still exist? Their product catalog does not appear to be updated in the last ~20 years (owing to a Y2K compliance statement prominent on the front page), so unless they have a side business not listed on their website, it seems unlikely they’re still in business. Surely nobody’s still buying their compilers or training materials on VHS. If they’re gone, who’s s…

Checking Texas's CPA system, it seems like the company is (formally) active. The domain is registered at GoDaddy and it points to an IP in DigitalOcean's space.

If I had to assume, they probably still have some limited sales, support and consulting (ex. schools with teachers used to old software? companies with unusual development environments?).

While looking for Mix Software, Inc., though, I found their official(?) YouTube channel with the introductions for their C [0] and C++ [1] courses uploaded 8 years ago. They definitely have that old 90's VHS feeling to them, complete with music, early 3D animations and everything.

It would seem that the MIX C compiler for CP/M 80 got preserved at some point, too! [2] I'd need to look into it, but this looks promising.

[0] https://youtu.be/ikTh2JQbkls

[1] https://youtu.be/wAm3CKoJW3o

[2] http://www.cpm8680.com/mix/index.htm

Post reply on HN