News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on The Development of the C Language (1993). Parent comment

Re:The Development of the C Language (1993) by hga on Friday December 18, 2015 @09:39AM (#10758646)
Perhaps the more significant "accident" of history, occurring before IBM-PCs with much memory got out there in large numbers, was all the vendors of 68000 based systems who didn't follow the lead of Apollo Computer and instead got a relatively cheap UNIX(TM) licence.

As PCs got more capable and more and more people were willing to program them in C---I don't remember Borland being a big player in this, in fact, it was Microsoft that produced the first really solid C compiler---the same sorts of constraints that helped birth UNIX(TM) and C were in play, until it was by and large too late to change course.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Development of the C Language (1993) by ArkyBeagle on Friday December 18, 2015 @12:57PM (#10759778)
You're correct, but before Borland 'C' ( I think to directly compete with Microsoft ) much was done in Borland Pascal. Of course, much was done after as well.

I think the results of Apollo's decision speaks for itself. If something is an order of magnitude cheaper, it will propagate faster, whether it's objectively better or not.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Development of the C Language (1993) by pjmlp on Friday December 18, 2015 @12:42PM (#10759692)
Maybe I am a bit too much biased to Borland, but Microsoft MS-DOS compilers weren't that great, they were even the last MS-DOS compiler vendor to support C++.

They only started to have something worth buying with the 32 bit version of Visual C++ and Borland loosing their focus, until then not really.

[ Parent | on HN ]