61–70 of 77 posts
I loved Power C. The paper manual was quite amazing - imagine all the man pages, but informative with examples and superbly written. I kept using that manual for years until it quite literally fell apart, purely because it was so good.
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.
Until then I couldn't afford Lattice C for the Amiga or whatever was available for MS-DOS. (as a poor student)
I'd love to see the VHS tapes with lessons that teach you C
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.
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.
Very True.
All documentation that came with the then OSes, Toolchains etc. were top-notch. Far better then many of the textbooks being published today. I still have a volume of early C++ papers (some authored by Stroustrup himself) which came with the SCO Unix C++ toolchain. That was the first place i learnt about "C++ Internals" i.e. vtables etc.
> 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…
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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 not strange. Working with niche compilers was normal and high prices were expected. Even as a student I shelled out what would have been pretty significant money at the time for Borland C++.
I hat to get the money from different kinds of gigs while at high school.
Still, it is goes with your point, as the minimum wage would be around 300 euros when converted to today's money, if I get the proportions right.
However that is because I wanted to have the real deal, boxes, manuals and so forth, on a street bazaar those floppies would have been more accessible, as it was still the days when piracy reigned, and there wasn't any government agency checking on software licences compliance.
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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…
They decided to go after the enterprise market with enterprise prices, and with it killed the indie devs that were loyal to Borland and their great tooling.
It was also a key point that finally triggered Anders to accept the calls from ex-Borland colleagues working at Microsoft.
https://behindthetech.libsynpro.com/001-anders-hejlsberg-a-c...
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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.
Any old timer can map those cloud prices to the oldie mainframes workloads accounting.
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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 a major motivation for me to get into Linux when it started. Until then I couldn't afford Lattice C for the Amiga or whatever was available for MS-DOS. (as a poor student)
Until then, very few cared GCC existed in first place.