[HN Gopher] Byte Magazine: The C Programming Language (1983)
___________________________________________________________________
Byte Magazine: The C Programming Language (1983)
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 204 points
Date : 2022-09-09 16:00 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (archive.org)
| sanjayts wrote:
| Direct page link for those interested --
| https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-08/page/n49/m...
| themadturk wrote:
| My attempt to learn to program in the early 90s took me to a
| small business college, and I was eager to learn C. Our
| instruction was so execrable half of the class took off after the
| evening's first break and spent the rest of the night eating
| calamari at the restaurant across the street. Eventually our
| complaints gained sympathy in the office; the teacher was fired
| and we all got full passing credit for two quarters of C.
|
| Unfortunately I didn't learn the language well enough to ever use
| it.
| klik99 wrote:
| Amazing to get perspective on what made C fresh and exciting - I
| only have known the basic narrative "Unix used C so it got super
| popular", but this article really filled in the info.
|
| Also I could imagine what it was like living through this time,
| schematics for modems, cheesy ads for EEPROM writers, what a
| wonderful magazine, I would have been waiting by the door for
| this to be delivered each month.
| gramie wrote:
| From 1988-1991 I lived in a hut in a small African mountain
| village. No running water or electricity, but I wrote programs
| on paper and waited with bated breath for every issue of Byte
| (several months delayed of course). I would read them from
| cover to cover a dozen times, perusing every article, every
| advertisement, every editorial. I remember a listing that
| created a fern using a short, recursive PostScript program.
|
| About once a month I would journey down to the capital, where
| -- in exchange for my IT services -- they let me tinker to my
| heart's content and type in my programs (the only language
| available, and the only one I knew at the time was GW-BASIC).
| worstestes wrote:
| Whoa! Love this story. Do you happen to blog? I and I'm sure
| many others here on HN would be interested in hearing more
| details about your journey.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| That is an amazing story! Did you get paid for your IT
| services as well?
| ncmncm wrote:
| I found the original "C Programming Language" by Kernighan
| and Ritchie ("K&R") at my university bookstore in, maybe,
| 1980. I read it cover to cover twice on a plane flight,
| memorizing it, and immediately recognized its superiority
| over Pascal as it existed then. Everyone who made a Pascal
| extended it, incompatibly with everybody else, to try to
| match C. Any of those would have sufficed, but none could
| win.
| adamredwoods wrote:
| Love retro magazines. Byte had some great covers. I recently
| flipped through an old Compute! magazine looking at the type-in
| programs for different computer platforms at the time (IBM PCjr,
| Commodore, Apple, Atari).
| salgernon wrote:
| I've been unable to convince Dall-e to render anything "in the
| style of artist Robert Tinney". I love his work - and have
| several prints of his byte covers.
| dcminter wrote:
| I'm guessing none of his illustrations were in the training
| set? One can get something along those lines by specifying
| "... drawn with pencil crayons"
| tomcam wrote:
| It was the September 1983 issue of COMPUTE! that opened the
| gates to my life as a programmer. They had programs that did
| interesting things but that also came with clear explanations.
| A while later they had a type-in word processor named
| SpeedScript that I used for years in the early part of my
| technical writing career.
| [deleted]
| just_askin wrote:
| P 401 for a certain William Gates take on integration challenges
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| From page 52:
|
| > Operating systems have to deal with some very unusual objects
| and events: interrupts; memory maps; apparent locations in memory
| that really represent devices, hardware traps and faults; and I/O
| controllers. It is unlikely that even a low-level model can
| adequately support all of these notions or new ones that come
| along in the future. So a key idea in C is that the language
| model be flexible; with escape hatches to allow the programmer to
| do the right thing, even if the language designer didn't think of
| it first.
|
| This. _This_ is the difference between C and Pascal. This is why
| C won and Pascal lost - because Pascal prohibited everything but
| what Wirth thought should be allowed, and Wirth had far too
| limited a vision of what people might need to do. Ritchie, in
| contrast, knew he wasn 't smart enough to play that game, so he
| didn't try. As a result, in practice C was considerably more
| usable than Pascal. The closer you were to the metal, the greater
| C's advantage. And in those days, you were often pretty close to
| the metal...
|
| Later, on page 60:
|
| > Much of the C model relies on the programmer always being
| right, so the task of the language is to make it easy what is
| necessary... The converse model, which is the basis of Pascal and
| Ada, is that the programmer is often wrong, so the language
| should make it hard to say anything incorrect... Finally, the
| large amount of freedom provided in the language means that you
| can make truly spectacular errors, far exceeding the relatively
| trivial difficulties you encounter misusing, say, BASIC.
|
| Also true. And it is true that the "Pascal model" of the
| programmer has quite a bit of truth to it. But programmers
| collectively chose freedom over restrictions, even restrictions
| that were intended to be for their own good.
| cmollis wrote:
| How I miss bookstores.. I realize that they still exist, but for
| me as a (mostly average) comp sci student, the bookstore was the
| place that I could find the code snippets and algorithm solutions
| for my classes. I spent hours just reading programming books,
| magazine articles (like Byte)..taking notes..remembering
| techniques.. couldn't wait to try them out. Pretty nerd-y now
| that I look back on it. I actually found it kind of fun..
| although this is the first time I've admitted it (taking the
| first step is the hardest). Now it is stack overflow and google,
| as we all know. good times.
| wistlo wrote:
| So many long-forgotten companies advertising!
|
| So many modems!
|
| I know someone who was a grad student at that time, and how
| excited he was to get a 2400 baud modem and his own VT-100 for
| work on the VAX.
|
| That grad student was me, though today it seems almost impossible
| to remember what it was like back then. I do remember ruining a
| colleague's line-by-line source printout by sending a console
| message that read, "Andropov just died."
| sbf501 wrote:
| It's hard to get my head around what it would be like seeing
| C-like patterns for the first time if I was someone that already
| had a background in COBOL and Pascal. At my university, CS101 was
| taught with both COBOL and Pascal, but I had already had some C
| and 6502 assembly in the mid-80's. COBOL seemed like assembly
| with words instead of opcodes and cryptic operands. Pascal seemed
| like a more user-friendly C.
|
| I can see why C is preferable to COBOL as the world moved to more
| commodified OSes and something better than assembly was needed
| for drivers & kernels, but it would be interesting to know what
| Pascal "idiosyncrasies" turned people to "portable" C. Any old
| timers here care to weigh in?
| [deleted]
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Here is Kernighan's take on Pascal from 1981:
| https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pas...
|
| It seems pretty representative of other complaints about Pascal
| (versus C, in particular, but not always) I've seen from that
| same time.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Cleverly ignoring that Modula-2, released in 1978, sorts out
| those issues.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Modula-2 had lost that race already.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Kernighan had the experience then of writing "Software Tools
| in Pascal", updated from "... in RATFOR". RATFOR was a pre-
| processor for FORTRAN that made it look sort of Pascal-ish.
| People could use it to code and run unixy utilities on their
| machines that only had a FORTRAN compiler. Good times!
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| See "Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language"
| (https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-
| pas...). It's written by Brian Kernighan, but it's not a hit
| piece. It's also not a comparison to C.
|
| Kernighan (and P. J. Plaugher) had written a book called
| "Software Tools". It was supposed to give several reasonably-
| lengthy examples of software that did actual useful functions.
| It was written in RATFOR, which is a pre-processor for FORTRAN.
| Some time later, they re-wrote the book to use Pascal, calling
| it (predictably enough) "Software Tools In Pascal". After
| writing it, Kernighan wrote this paper, basically because he
| was thinking "That should have been way easier than writing the
| same stuff in RATFOR. Why was that so hard?"
|
| I used Pascal for two years professionally, and many of the
| issues in the paper I ran into. Pascal was just clumsy to use.
| It was a good teaching language, but not good for professional
| programmers in many cases. (C, on the other hand, was written
| by people trying to write an operating system, and turned out
| to be a decent language for writing operating systems in.)
|
| Note well: All of this is true of the _original_ Pascal. Things
| like Turbo Pascal improved it and made it actually a usable
| language. But even that wasn 't portable - there wasn't a Turbo
| Pascal for anything other than the IBM PC, so far as I recall.
| And every other "improved" version was different from Turbo
| Pascal, so there was no portability between extensions either.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Let's just ignore the C dialects outside UNIX like Small-C
| and RatC, or that we had to wait until 1990 for proper
| standard, and not even K&R C was a given outside UNIX.
| kloch wrote:
| The delay in publishing a "proper" standard was due to the
| incredible success/usefulness of the defacto K&R standard.
| But as you point out that was hard to find outside of Unix.
| I suspect this was mostly due to the effort required to
| implement the full standard library and/or resource
| limitations on many systems.
|
| For example, there was a Small-C compiler available for the
| Atari 800 in 1982:
|
| http://www.atarimania.com/utility-atari-400-800-xl-
| xe-c-65_1...
|
| "... based on the Small C compiler published in Dr. Dobb's
| Journal"
|
| If you look in the beginning of the manual it has a list of
| what is and is not supported. They claim it is sufficient
| to compile C/65 itself but there are lots of things we take
| for granted missing.
| pjmlp wrote:
| My first contact with C was RatC, via "A book on C", with
| its implementation as appendix.
|
| https://books.google.com/books/about/A_Book_on_C.html?id=
| e5p...
|
| So it is kind of ironic this revisionism how great was C
| "portability", when in reality it was full of dialects
| outside UNIX just like the competition.
| WalterBright wrote:
| At one point in the 1980s I counted 30 C compilers
| available for the IBM PC. Programming on the PD _dominated_
| programming in the 80s, hardly anyone had access to Unix
| machines. Probably 90% of C programming was done on the PC.
|
| The 1980s C++ compilers on the PC also dominated the C++
| compiler use. C++ on the PC vaulted the language from
| obscurity into the major language it is today.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Not in Europe it did not, it was all about QuickBasic,
| Turbo Pascal and TASM over here.
|
| And if we go into the Amiga it was about Assembly and
| AMOS mostly.
|
| On Apple, Object Pascal and Assembly, HyperCard, MPW with
| C++ came later into the pictures.
|
| On thing I do agree, by the time Windows and OS/2 were
| taking off, C++ on the PC was everywhere and only
| masochistics would insist in using C instead of C++
| frameworks like OWL, MFC or CSet++.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Half of my C and C++ compiler sales were in Europe. The
| Mac did indeed lag far behind - Apple bet on the wrong
| horse (Pascal).
| pjmlp wrote:
| Europe has many countries, I can assure you that I only
| saw Zortech on magazines after it was acquired by
| Symantec and was shipping MFC alongside with it.
|
| Sadly I never saw it anywhere on sale, as the graphical
| debugging for C++ data structures was quite cool to read
| about.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Britain and Germany saw the most sales. For reasons
| inexplicable to me, France bought very few compilers.
| icedchai wrote:
| I learned C on the Amiga, starting around 1989. That was
| Lattice C (later SAS C.) Eventually I moved on to Linux
| (SLS!) which, of course, had GCC.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| It probably depends on what time in the 80s as well; TFA
| is from 1983.
|
| A while back I chatted with someone who worked on both C
| and Pascal compilers around that time period and got the
| impression that the majority of their customers were
| people running on 68k based Unix workstations. May have
| just been their niche I suppose.
|
| I didn't start programming until closer to 1990, and
| started with Mix software's C compiler on a 286, because
| that's what I could afford.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The money in compilers in those days was on the PC.
| justin66 wrote:
| > there wasn't a Turbo Pascal for anything other than the IBM
| PC, so far as I recall
|
| There was a z80 version of Turbo Pascal that ran on CP/M
| machines (incidentally, one thing that's striking about the
| first several years of BYTE is how many huge Cromenco ads
| there are) as well as the Apple II with a Z80 card. That,
| along with x86 support, covered a lot of ground.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I was experienced with PDP-11 assembler when I was given a copy
| of K+R. Since many of C's semantics are based on the
| peculiarities of the -11 instructions, I understood it
| immediately. It was a breath of fresh air compared to Fortran
| or Pascal. I never wrote another line in either of those
| languages after reading K+R.
|
| Some things that come from the -11:
|
| 1. post increment and decrement
|
| 2. integer promotion rules
|
| 3. floating point promotion rules
|
| 3. `register` storage class
| 10000truths wrote:
| 4. Null-terminated strings, the scourge of all C programmers
| to come.
| davidgay wrote:
| The common alternative was single-byte-length strings.
| Null-terminated strings was much nicer.
| superjan wrote:
| If you know assembly, Pascal took away a lot and gave little in
| return, and it was verbose. I worked on a 80x25 monitor so the
| verbosity was annoying. Only functions could return values, but
| they were not guaranteed to be pure. No early returns.
|
| I also remember there were library functions with variable # of
| elements, but you could not write them (variable arg functions)
| yourself. Really hated that.
|
| Not all of these were fair criticisms, but they were enough to
| switch for me.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| C had pointer arithmetic which let you do systems work that you
| could not do in PASCAL, by the later 1980s Turbo Pascal had
| extensions to fill the gap and I liked it better but school had
| me using Unix workstations that didn't have Turbo Pascsl so I
| switched to C.
| sbf501 wrote:
| Ah. That's a good point. No pun intended.
|
| I forgot how powerful being able to address raw memory is
| with a non-asm language.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Plenty of Pascal versions had such extensions, not only TP.
| WalterBright wrote:
| In the early 80s, they didn't. Pascal was more or less
| unusable on the PC. Pascal remained unusable until it got a
| boatload of extensions. The trouble was, every Pascal added
| different extensions, making Pascal unportable.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Just like most C dialects outside UNIX, but for C it
| counts as features.
| WalterBright wrote:
| There were portability issues with C compilers, for
| example, value preserving vs sign preserving integer
| promotion rules.
|
| But Pascal was _unusable_ without extensions. I mean
| that. I wrote programs in Pascal.
|
| For example, Wirth's Pascal had no provision for programs
| that had more than one source file.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I wouldn't consider RatC or Small-C that usable without
| the pile of Assembly code they needed to be usable beyond
| bare bones control flow statements.
|
| Like I say, two weights two measures.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Even the bad early C compilers were far more usable than
| Pascal. I know this, because where I worked at Data I/O
| we tried a whole bunch of them - Pascal, Fortran, and C.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Nothing was non-trivially usable on an IBM PC without a
| pile of assembly code.
|
| Integrating C with assembly was easy. Pascal originally
| didn't support that at all. And academics were utterly
| horrified by things like Turbo Pascal.
| schleck8 wrote:
| Crazy, on the first pages they mention a cutting edge 8 Mhz PC
| while our current midrange consumer CPUs can do over 5 Ghz
| icedchai wrote:
| You might not believe this, but some 8-bit micros from that era
| even ran at 1 mhz!
| pjmlp wrote:
| Cutting edge indeed, my Times 2068 ran at a whopping 3.5 MHz.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_2068
| lbriner wrote:
| I think the amount of technology made those magazines so much
| more exciting than today's computer magazines which are almost
| always about computers as black boxes or marketing nonsense or
| pure software with no hardware applications.
|
| Back then, I used to dream about buying an eprom programmer!
|
| I miss electronics...
| schlauerfox wrote:
| It is still around if you look, new Single Board Computers, dev
| boards, kits for 'retro' computers. It's still just as big as
| it ever was, the difference is the mainstream is WAY bigger,
| just like Apple and Microsoft has sabotaged DIY and left that
| behind and makes money on hiding the DIY behind their
| convenience gardens. Check out adafruit or digikey or element14
| or keysight or any of the gamejams and hackathons. Makerspaces.
| PICO-8. Circuit Cellar, Nuts & Volts magazines. It was a HOBBY
| back then, and the hobby still exists just like there are ham
| radio clubs, but the industry it spawned has largely
| overshadowed it. Life is what you make of it, put in the effort
| if you really miss it, you'll find good company!
| ncmncm wrote:
| Once you start buying easy-to-program microcontroller gadgets
| from Crowd Supply and Adafruit Industries, it is hard to
| stop. Nowadays they all have bluetooth built in, so can be
| controlled wholly from your phone; no buttons, display, or
| even USB connector needed.
| khendron wrote:
| Oooh! I have a copy of that at home! https://imgur.com/a/rWHmft0
| metanonsense wrote:
| I remember when I was a young assembly programmer and I looked
| down on those obtuse C programmers who needed such a slow high-
| level language. After high-school, having read all those
| fantastic W. Richard Stevens books I simply could not understand
| why anybody on earth wanted to use C++ when C was easily capable
| of modeling complex object structures. When they forced us to use
| Java, I was deeply in shock: was this really a programming
| language or more a toy for little kids and why would they want to
| slow down computers to a crawl?
| ncmncm wrote:
| Instead you slowed _yourself_ to a crawl.
|
| (Which is not to say anything good about Java. The key to Java
| was elucidated by Mark Dominus: " _I enjoyed programming in
| Java, and being relieved of the responsibility for producing a
| quality product_. ")
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Friend of mine says the great thing about Java is when things
| go sideways you can just quit and get another gig.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Java's secret sauce was that it liberated a whole
| generation of Microsoft sharecroppers. Microsoft has since
| clawed some back via its C# marketing, but cannot dictate a
| new "framework" every second year as it once did.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Java's actual secret sauce was that it was mostly like
| C/C++, but with no unsafe memory accesses. It was
| essentially the Rust of the late 1990s, only a whole lot
| slower and clunkier than real Rust. There was a lot of
| enterprise software being rewritten from C++ to Java as a
| result.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Nobody at the time gave a hoot about "unsafe memory
| accesses". That is a wholly recent conceit. Nobody then
| cared about security. _Sendmail_ was how e-mail was
| delivered, and was, believe it, widely admired.
|
| Java was _just enough_ like the C++ of 1990 to compete,
| but with garbage collection and a big library, and
| without confusing pointers, so lower-skilled programmers
| could use it. That is all. Computers were literally
| _thousands_ of times slower than today. Java was
| considered just barely fast enough.
|
| But without freeing programmers from the Microsoft
| frameworks treadmill, it would have sunk without a trace.
| pmontra wrote:
| For me it was no more malloc and free for every stupid
| little thing inside every function I had to write (string
| processing, arrays, etc.) But I was already using Perl
| for web development (no malloc no free) and I wasn't
| overly interested in Java. I made some money out of it
| later on, probably none past 2012. Then always languages
| with garbage collection, possibly interpreted. I don't
| like to have to compile and build to deploy.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I think Java's _real_ secret sauce was the library. It
| had _everything_ - much more than the standard C /C++
| library.
|
| > ... but with no unsafe memory accesses.
|
| Mostly true. But you could still get a null pointer
| exception in Java - which is especially weird because
| Java doesn't _have_ pointers.
| ncmncm wrote:
| The library was utterly necessary, purely because the
| people the language was meant for would have been
| completely at sea without.
|
| The contempt Java's designers held for its users fairly
| drips, in what they write about it.
| macintux wrote:
| The initial Java release didn't even have a regex
| library. As a Perl programmer I found that
| incomprehensible.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| longtime C/C++ guy who became a longtime Java guy:
|
| the most time I've ever spent dealing with invalid
| addresses and memory leaks, in production /enterprise
| code, has been in Java, not C or C++
|
| my personal theory is because despite how much safer Java
| was by design, culturally, beginning in the early 2000s,
| it also opened the floodgates to a big wave of lower
| caliber programmers "just doing it for steady jobs" and
| so a "99% right? ship it! someone will file a ticket next
| week if needed" mentality was more common
|
| not the fault or credit of the langs, just the type of
| people they attracted, at large scale
|
| Java: "I'm super friendly! Just click here!"
|
| C: "Here's a razor blade. Here's a razor blade. Another.
| Another. Now assemble to build a maze. Also the maze is
| invisible. Oh and our manual is 50 pages."
|
| (I appreciate both in diff ways.)
| tialaramex wrote:
| In essence _all_ you have for objects in Java is
| pointers.
|
| For the primitive types, like long, you can't get a null
| pointer exception, because there really is no pointer,
| but for any object type it's actually a pointer, the
| object itself lives on the heap and you're given a
| pointer to it, if the object is null, that's a null
| pointer. They don't feel much like pointers from a
| language like C because you're not provided with pointer
| arithmetic - you can't try to add my_object + 16 as you
| could in C - and because Java was a modern language which
| knows what you mean when you write foo.bar, unlike C and
| C++ which expect you to remember whether foo is a pointer
| and write foo->bar so that the poor compiler needn't
| figure it out.
|
| For modern Java the compiler does escape analysis and may
| conclude an object cannot "escape" in which case it may
| be created as part of the stack frame of the code which
| uses it instead of on the heap, but it's still basically
| a pointer.
|
| This is all rather awkward, for example Java's 64-bit
| double precision floating point number is a primitive,
| always 8 bytes on your stack no need for a pointer to
| anything - but if you want your custom four 16-bit
| integers type (maybe representing RGBA) that's an Object
| so it is treated differently even though it's also just 8
| bytes. C gets this part right, your custom types (struct,
| and to a lesser extent enum and union) aren't treated so
| much worse than the language built-in types.
|
| Anyway, it's Memory Safe because the null pointer
| exception is essentially the same behaviour as if you try
| to unwrap() a None in Rust, the JVM isn't going to let
| you just "press on" as you might in C, you've got a
| programming error and must either recover from that or
| your program aborts.
| TomK32 wrote:
| That makes me wonder Ruby is the language I'll be stuck with
| for another 20 years and just be content with a balance between
| performance of servers and my productivity...
| tr1ll10nb1ll wrote:
| Another 20 years from now, I highly doubt you'd have to even
| care as much about performance of servers as you do now
| stemming from the use of a language that keeps you
| productive.
|
| Remember, hardware is getting more powerful and cheaper.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Nobody cares about performance of servers _today_. Maybe
| you have noticed that they are not now programmed with
| performant languages?
| sizzzzlerz wrote:
| Couple of year out of college and into my first engineering
| job, I went to work on a job to write code for the 68000-based
| controller of a signal processing system. It had been decided
| that we were to use this new language called C, which no one on
| the team was experienced with. I was sent to Houston to attend
| a one week class on C with the expectation that I could mentor
| the rest of the team. They were having to learn it from K&R. We
| used a new compiler from Green Hills, which was quite buggy, to
| compile our fragile code to run on a CPU our hardware
| colleagues had built that had its own bugs. We had a couple of
| big ass in-circuit emulators on which to do our debugging. They
| had quirks of their own, as well. Somehow, we were able to get
| it working quite well. As big of a challenge as it was, we had
| an absolute glorious time!
| arthurcolle wrote:
| So did you guys win?
| bluetomcat wrote:
| I started my journey with trying to learn C++ in the late 1990s
| when it was the "cool" thing. Most of the books and the sparse
| educational material on the web back then made little sense to
| me. I wanted to instruct a computer to do cool things like the
| games I played or the programs I used, but all I got was obtuse
| passages about taxonomies of animals and shapes (CAnimal, CDog
| and CShape, CSquare). Stuff like virtual functions and
| constructor types was deeply uninteresting and irrelevant for
| me at that point.
|
| Then came the "aha" moment. I downloaded a few tutorials which
| used the GLUT library from C and I was instantly amused. Now I
| could draw 3D teapots and text and rectangles with almost no
| boilerplate and I had examples to learn from. A turning event
| that has influenced all aspects of my life for the latter 20
| years.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Weird. How is it I am feeling nostalgic for the ads?
| dcchuck wrote:
| Perusing with the same feelings
|
| Funny how the prices haven't changed much (seeing a "new
| computer" for $1,995), given the change in computing power and
| purchasing power (of the dollar)
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| I was wondering why this thing is 578 pages long, and it turns
| out it's at least 80% advertising if the first 50 pages are
| anything to go by.
| mikelevins wrote:
| I worked in a bookstore at the start of the 1980s. Its
| magazine section had many hundreds of titles (I stocked
| them). All of them were more or less that way: mostly ads by
| page area and page count, with the ratio of ads to content
| rising as you got toward the back of the magazine (but with
| most magazines maintaining the last couple of pages for
| distinctive editorial content).
|
| Magazines are generally much slimmer nowadays. Magazine racks
| are generally smaller and less ubiquitous. I presume the ad
| dollars have mostly moved onto the web, and the great
| majority of magazines have shrunk--many disappearing
| entirely.
| lymeswold wrote:
| Because leafing through ads for stuff in 1983 was the
| equivalent of googling for stuff today.
| cxf12 wrote:
| Imagine how I feel! I was heading into my sophomore year in
| high school in 1983, the same month this article came out. I
| wasn't a subscriber to BYTE then, but the memories of us
| learning Assembler and C at the time are almost as vivid now as
| they were back then.
| galdosdi wrote:
| I know it's mostly nostalgia, but the ads also are very
| qualitatively different from today's.
|
| Look how much text and detailed discussion there is compared to
| today's ads. These ads just seem to respect the reader's
| intellect more.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Because it was a time of magic. Every month you could find
| things that were significantly better, significantly cheaper,
| or completely brand new. (And by "completely", I do not mean "a
| new product that does the same old thing". I mean something I'd
| look at and think "I never even thought of doing that with a
| computer".)
|
| There was just a newness and excitement, and the ads show it.
| bbarnett wrote:
| And this mirrors the web today. All the new stuff is over, it
| is all incremental change, rehashing, repeat.
| lordleft wrote:
| I was born in the late 80s, but I also feel nostalgic. I think
| it's because there was more of a sense of play in computing
| back in the day.
|
| I feel a real romanticism for vintage computing.
| winter_blue wrote:
| Yea, I mean I was born in the 90s, and I have to say the ads
| are really _really_ enjoyable. I love the amount of depth and
| detail, and the longer-form article style that they use.
| ryandrake wrote:
| And the beautiful serif typefaces (including in the titles!)
| and wild colors too! These days everything is Helvetica and
| friends, and bland shades of gray.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I didn't realize it was more than 50% ads, more than most
| websites we consider terrible nowadays.
|
| I think one reason is that back then, it was the way of keeping
| in touch with the commercial offering. Now, there are millions
| of review websites and user groups for that. A quick search can
| least you to the most niche products easily. As a result, ads
| just try to sell you stuff you are already aware of, instead of
| informing you about a new product and its capabilities, making
| them a lot less interesting.
|
| And even ads about shady products were kind of interesting.
| [deleted]
| pjlegato wrote:
| Many ads at the time still used a strategy of "reasoning with
| the reader": explaining the technical benefits of the product,
| and how using it would make your life better in some way.
|
| Sometime around the 90s, most advertising gradually shifted to
| emotional manipulation, which is empirically more effective at
| scale. The famous iPod ads, for example, said nothing at all
| about the iPod's technical merits, or how you'd benefit by
| using an iPod instead of other MP3 players. They just showed
| some vaguely cool-looking person listening to an iPod.
|
| The "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads depicted PCs as old, uncool
| dorks; while the Mac is fun and interesting and young. Not a
| word about any actual features or benefits of the Mac. Purely
| associative emotional branding.
|
| This actually does work in terms of "selling more iPods at
| scale," though it is dissatisfying to that small segment of the
| population that cares about making informed and rational
| decisions. Most HN readers fall into this category, though
| there aren't enough of us in the world to carry mass
| advertising strategies.
| ozay wrote:
| I was always fascinated by the BMW ads of the time:
| https://www.motortrend.com/news/bmw-1980s-ads-jeff-zwart-
| pho...
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > Sometime around the 90s, most advertising gradually shifted
| to emotional manipulation...
|
| Yup.
|
| > ... which is empirically more effective at scale.
|
| I don't think that's the issue. Back in the 80s, stuff came
| out _regularly_ that was _significantly_ better than the
| predecessor (if there was one). Emotional manipulation took
| over when new versions no longer had significant technical
| advantages over existing competitors.
| system16 wrote:
| > Not a word about any actual features or benefits of the
| Mac.
|
| From what I recall almost every "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ad's
| premise was a feature or task that the Mac did easier or
| better, leaving the PC deflated or envious.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Back then people often bought magazines for the ads.
|
| I still buy magazines for the ads. For example, I buy Mopar
| Action for the ads that are targeted towards me for things I
| might want or need for my Dodge. When I open the mag, I want to
| look at the ads.
|
| This is fundamentally different from guessing what I want to
| see based on my browsing history. If I open a site on cooking,
| I don't want to see ads for car parts or kitchen faucets,
| regardless of my history. I would want to see ads for cooking
| supplies.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| I bought hundreds of computer shoppers. Just because it was
| ads. I think there was an article or two in there sometimes.
| It is funny enough where I learned the xor trick. That thing
| was a monster at least a couple of inches thick of nothing
| but computer ads.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| The Alice and Bob article... I don't remember the content
| exactly.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| As I recall they included just enough editorial material to
| qualify for the "literature" postage rate rather than the
| "advertising" postage rate, which was higher.
|
| (those might not be the exact terms that were/are used)
| ajross wrote:
| > If I open a site on cooking, I don't want to see ads for
| car parts or kitchen faucets, regardless of my history. I
| would want to see ads for cooking supplies.
|
| Is that not the way it works for you? I mean, I pull up
| allrecipes.com and see a bunch of food-related stuff like my
| local supermarket (and one less relevant ad for Iceland Air,
| no idea). Closer to the subject at hand, the modern "Byte
| Magazine" might be something like tomshardware.com, where I
| see lots of tech products being hawked (phones, a tablet,
| Xfinity service), and ads for the retailers that sell them
| (lots of Best Buy on the pages I saw).
|
| I mean, sure, there are going to be exceptions. But in
| general ads on the internet seem at least reasonably
| relevant.
|
| It really seems sometimes like sites like HN are turning into
| information bubbles, where concepts like "advertising in the
| modern world is a dystopian disaster" are... just taken as
| faith? The experience of regular people doesn't really agree,
| and it seems like we're becoming more detached as the years
| go by.
| WalterBright wrote:
| No, it doesn't work for me. I'd turn on context-sensitive
| ads on my sites, and then see what ads it supplies.
|
| Unrelated garbage. I remember once buying a kitchen faucet,
| and for months it seems every site I visit showed me ads
| for faucets.
|
| For example, on a programming site it would keep pushing
| ads for the Batman movie. Phooey.
| ajross wrote:
| With all respect, that sounds like a criticism of
| internet advertising c. 2008 or so. I mean, sure, weird
| stuff like that happens and there are always going to be
| anecdotes. But no, for a long time now advertising on
| targetted/niche/interest-based sites has followed that
| niche, for the obvious reason that that's where the best
| ROI on the advertising is.
|
| I mean, sure, there will always be funny hiccups, and on
| the edges there are genuine issues of privacy and justice
| and market fairness to be discussed.
|
| But the idea that we're in some kind of advertising
| dystopia is simply not the experience of regular users.
| It's a meme[1] being perpetuated in the tech community.
| Regular products purchased by regular people are being
| advertised very effectively, and on the whole with near-
| universal approval of the customers.
|
| [1] And as mentioned, an increasingly detached and
| frankly slightly deranged one. Real concerns about
| privacy are now being short-circuited with nonsense about
| "But Their Ads", and that's hurting the discourse we
| actually need.
| desiarnezjr wrote:
| Today's marketing is much more targeted and dark pattern
| driven.
|
| There was an earnestness to many ads back then. Either
| "native" style ads, or price lists -- given researching
| anything was much more difficult without internet,
| magazines and print brochures were all you had. Ads were
| critical.
| theflyingelvis wrote:
| I totally remember this issue back in the day. I'm so old. Sigh.
| NobodyNada wrote:
| The "letters to the editor" are really fun to read -- it's like
| reading the HN comments of the time, with the same combination of
| insight and cynicism.
|
| > In response to Gregg Williams' editorial ("The New Generation
| of Human- Engineered Software," April, p. 6), the mouse of Lisa,
| Visi On, and their predecessor, the Xerox Star, is a truly
| fascinating hardware device, and on those few occasions that I
| have seen these devices in use, I have been impressed. But the
| mouse is not revolutionary, and, as its name suggests, it is
| really nothing more than a rodent. Its functional predecessor was
| the light pen. Some years ago, light pens were fashionable
| devices for selecting a particular function, and they are still
| in use. But displays attaching light pens had to have an
| appropriate phosphor, and they were not as easy to program as
| function keys. About the same time, touch- sensitive screens were
| introduced, and they are still used in applications such as
| online catalogs in libraries; here, too, however, programming
| appears to be the chief stumbling block.
|
| > If the name of the game is "ease of use," the industry would be
| far wiser to develop touch-sensitive displays than mice. Because
| a display has no moving parts, it is likely to prove more durable
| than a mouse. And a finger placed on a display screen does not
| require additional desk space, as a mouse does. If an executive
| were having an office conference, don't you think he might rather
| touch his screen a couple of times than roll a mouse around his
| desk pressing buttons on it?
|
| > There are, obviously, many considerations at work in the
| development of new products. My bet, simply stated, is that the
| mouse is not a viable product. At best, it will limp along like
| bubble memory. - John P. Rash, President, Acorn Data Ltd.
|
| There's also:
|
| - Several refutations to a previous letter which claimed CRT
| monitors are a radiation hazard
|
| - An engineer from Intel responding to criticisms of their
| FORTRAN compiler with "those issues have been fixed in the latest
| version"
|
| - Debate over structured programming and strong typing
|
| - Debate on what "computer literacy" means and whether the
| general population needs it (including a claim that WYSYWIG
| editors and desktop file managers do not make computers easier to
| use because "a desktop manager is only a sophisticated analog for
| being able to copy one file into another")
|
| - Conversations on software prices and piracy
|
| - And, of course, someone pointing out a typo in an article.
| [deleted]
| LeonenTheDK wrote:
| The more things change, the more they stay the same. I'm not
| even close to old but as I get more experienced I continue to
| see "what's old is new again" ring true.
| fcoury wrote:
| Indeed. It's like we are always reinventing the wheel on a
| very cyclic manner. We go round and round to come back to the
| same abstractions.
|
| I had to Google the quote, but it goes like "those who don't
| learn from the past are bound to repeat it". I am not sure if
| there's a way around it or some level or repetition is
| obligatory for things to move forward.
|
| Maybe it's like the saying that you can't really give out
| advice to someone, because your advice also comes with all
| your previous baggage. But on the other hand, that's how we
| learn and transmit our knowledge across generations right?
|
| I think there's some sort of true in all those "feelings" but
| we also can't deny there are also incremental change that
| persist over time... Hard to say.
| billylo wrote:
| I think it's like a spring. We feel like going in circle,
| but we move upwards a bit with every cycle.
| shafyy wrote:
| I'm also not old and I observe the same pattern. Somehow, it
| has a comforting effect on me.
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it;
| the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled
| with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has
| been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new
| under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, "See,
| this is new"? It has been already, in the ages before us.
| There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be
| any remembrance of later things yet to happen among those
| who come after.
|
| -- Ecclesiastes chapter 1, verses 8-11, RSV translation.
|
| Written about 2500 years ago, +/- some centuries (experts
| disagree on date and author). It's maybe a bit comforting
| and distressing at the same time.
| biblequote wrote:
| RedShift1 wrote:
| Missed opportunity to leave us a typo to point out.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Touch screens could not take off until coatings that repelled
| fingerprints were invented.
|
| The iPhone could not have succeeded without.
| chclau wrote:
| I know it is not directly related to this magazine, but this
| nostalgia brought back to me the name of my favorite magazine
| those days: Ahoy!
|
| And of course, who can forget the wonderful adds for the games
| from Infocom (Zork et al), who would "stick their graphics where
| the sun don't shine!". They were text based games, and very
| succesful on those days
| mikewarot wrote:
| I've never really embraced 'C'.. I thought case sensitivity was
| an anti-feature, along with null terminated strings.
|
| However, with my adoption of an old forth dialect - mstoical and
| a desire to play with kamby, it's time for me to add a new SSD,
| and install Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and get to work knowing this thing
| I've avoided forever.
|
| Perhaps, eventually, I can port a sane strings library to C, like
| the one in Free Pascal.
| msla wrote:
| I always wonder why people put C in quotes sometimes.
|
| It's amazing how angry some people get when you ask.
| mikewarot wrote:
| It's an old habit, I'm not sure where it came from, but for
| me it's always been 'C'.
| layer8 wrote:
| Writing a string library is a rite of passage for many C
| programmers, go for it.
| antirez wrote:
| In 1983 I was 6 and already starting to write code daily, using
| BASIC. But because the lack of something like Internet I was so
| culturally detached from real world IT that I learned C only in
| 1997: 14 years later.
| dleslie wrote:
| I was in a similar situation; though I'm roughly a decade
| younger. I grew up in the BBS era, and experienced the internet
| first as gopher and ftp access (archie!) through the local
| schoolsnet. I bought "Using Linux" by Sams in 1995 solely to
| get access to GCC, because a C compiler was extremely difficult
| to come by.
|
| And yet, within a year they became commonly available, for DOS
| and Windows even, thanks to DJGPP. The local schoolsnet added
| SLIP support, and we could access Delorie's website. While
| Microsoft and Borland were still charging an arm and a leg, and
| GNU couldn't be bothered to support non-free systems, it was
| Delorie who created that bridge to common users and opened the
| world of C programming to us.
| antirez wrote:
| Sorry I totally got the math wrong! I was 6 in '83. Anyway
| very similar story to mine. Also for me Slackware 1.2.3 gave
| me access to GCC...
| tomcam wrote:
| What BASIC dialects did you use for that 14-year period?
| sedatk wrote:
| Computer Design magazine's August 1983 issue had these articles:
|
| - C Language: Key to portability
|
| - Apple Lisa's revolutionary user interface
|
| - MS-DOS 2.0 brings Unix-like features
|
| - ArpaNet can be a game changer
|
| The editors had managed to cramp what would shape the next four
| decades of computing in a single issue.
| shadowofneptune wrote:
| The difference between MS-DOS 1.0 and 2.0 is rather shocking.
| It feels like that's the moment it really becomes DOS, instead
| of a variant of CP/M.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Literally the only thing DOS needed to do was start up a
| program. Differences between 1 and 2 are marginal. That is
| why windos didn't need to be any good: all it needed was to
| move the mouse pointer and let you click on a program.
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| "ArpaNet can be a game changer" must be a serious contender for
| understatement of the century
| richard_todd wrote:
| I had to check that out; found it here:
| https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_computerDe_143117685/m...
|
| (note: the articles sedatk mentioned didn't seem to be in the
| table of contents, but on PDF page 113 there is a "special
| report" section where I've found some of them)
| angst_ridden wrote:
| I was programming in Z-80 assembler in that timeframe, and was
| pretty excited by the idea of C. I had previously thought to
| myself that it would be possible to create a language that
| simplified the tedious, repetitive tasks in assembler but that
| didn't add bloat or take away byte-level control like BASIC did.
|
| I was an avid reader of Byte and 80-Micro back then.
|
| For various reasons, I focused on other studies for a few years
| after that, and didn't immediately learn C until after I went to
| college. I'm sure if I had learned C in '83, I would have had an
| entirely different career trajectory.
| unkeptbarista wrote:
| I was fortunate enough to start learning C, in 1983, using one
| of the compilers reviewed in that issue. BDS C for CPM.
| Learning C definitely paid off. Here it is nearly 40 years
| later, and I'm still using C for embedded development.
| angst_ridden wrote:
| I use C for embedded devices too, although I didn't end up
| learning C until '88 or '89. At that point, it was on IBM PCs
| and VAXen instead of my trusty TRS-80.
| ncmncm wrote:
| The things that made C successful are rarely recognized even by
| its fans, but much moreso by its critics and competitors. Things
| it is most criticized for are among them. They have made C hard
| to unseat. Too-easy conversion between arrays and pointers is one
| such criticism, but such conversion was essential to its success.
|
| C++ succeeded not just because it can call C libraries -- most
| languages can -- but because it retained every advantage C has,
| even those that few recognize. C++'s STL is a success because it
| built on what made C a success, deliberately. Alex Stepanov,
| anyway, understood. Most STL components are really just examples.
|
| Today we are locked in battle against C's weaknesses,
| particularly in how easy it is to exploit C programs. We lose
| that battle when new languages leave behind what made C
| successful. Too-easy accidental conversions _bad_ ; deliberate
| conversions possible, _good_.
|
| C got various other things subtly right, too: manifestly enough
| to make up for its blatant failings. If you would displace C, it
| is much more important to retain its strengths than to fix its
| flaws. You can do that without understanding by copying.
| Retaining strengths while leaving behind flaws requires
| understanding, which has proven too hard for most.
| chongli wrote:
| _Too-easy conversion between arrays and pointers is one such
| criticism, but such conversion was essential to its success._
|
| Could you elaborate on this point? Walter Bright famously wrote
| [1] that C's biggest mistake is that it implicitly degrades
| arrays to pointers when you pass them as arguments to
| functions. Do you have a rebuttal to his piece? I am not a C
| expert so I honestly don't know what could be wrong with his
| proposal.
|
| [1] https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/C-biggest-mistake.html
| ncmncm wrote:
| The failing there is that it is _implicit_. It didn 't need
| to be.
| petergeoghegan wrote:
| > C got various other things subtly right, too: manifestly
| enough to make up for its blatant failings. If you would
| displace C, it is much more important to retain its strengths
| than to fix its flaws.
|
| I agree. I wonder how feasible it is to separate the two,
| though. Not because it seems as if there is some unavoidable
| trade-off to be made (if that was it then somebody would have
| found a relatively crisp definition of said trade-off). I
| suspect that it's best understood as an emergent phenomenon.
|
| Consider the LINUX KERNEL MEMORY BARRIERS readme [1], which
| states very clearly: "Nevertheless, even this memory model
| should be viewed as the collective opinion of its maintainers
| rather than as an infallible oracle". And yet some people
| persist with the belief that such an Oracle must really be
| possible. Oracles are abstract concepts.
|
| C doesn't persist despite its contradictions. It persists
| because of them.
|
| I'm not claiming that this is good or bad. Just that it's the
| simplest explanation that I can think of.
|
| [1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/memory-
| barriers.txt
| pjmlp wrote:
| Stepanov used a lot of APL, Lisp and Smalltalk inspiration to
| create the STL, originally implemented in Ada 83 generics, and
| then thanks to Bjarne ported it to C++.
|
| There is a quite interesting session from talk done by him at
| Adobe, where he mentions his inspirations.
| ncmncm wrote:
| You misrepresent history: Stepanov implemented STL first in
| Lisp, then in Ada. Both were manifestly inadequate. Stepanov
| openly despised "OO gook", and lamented that "begin", "end",
| and operators ++ and * had to be class members until partial
| specialization finally made that unnecessary. (Now we have
| std::begin and end.) Partial specialization was added to C++
| specifically to make STL more practical.
|
| C++ proved adequate. But C++ _compilers_ of the time were
| not; all of them needed massive improvement to usefully build
| programs that used STL. (It took many years for Microsoft to
| get there; STL implementations obliged to work under
| Microsoft compilers were badly crippled until after C++11
| came out.) But no other language was up to the job.
|
| Bjarne did not motivate porting it to C++; the language did.
| Bjarne helped, but Andrew Koenig might have helped more.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Fortunately the talk is available for everyone to judge how
| history goes and what he actually thinks.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Maybe have a chat with him sometime.
| tibor_a wrote:
| Despite the historical value of the ads I quite dislike the ratio
| to content. I wanted to quickly scan the pages to get the gist
| what was the merit of C compared to its contemporaries and I
| spent half the time finding the actual content.
|
| I remember being much better at only seeing the content when I
| was reading magazines like this in the past but I still wouldn't
| like to return to those times.
|
| Also I think if it was possible to effectively ban all of the
| modern marketing techniques as many people want now the economic
| logic would result in paid magazines with content to ads ratio of
| 30 to 70.
| Narishma wrote:
| How much of that is because you're reading it on a screen? It's
| easier to skip ads in a paper magazine.
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| This is why I gave up on magazines in general (even before it
| was cool). It seems like their entire goal was to make actual
| content hard to find. The cover would have a list of headlines,
| then you'd look at the table of contents to see where that was,
| but it'd be under a different headline there. Then you'd
| finally get the page number, but around that spot, none of the
| pages had page numbers, and when you finally find what you're
| looking for it has an even different title than the cover and
| TOC. Then, once you start reading, you get to "continued on
| page ...". And again, none of those pages have page numbers
| near them, and there'd be yet a different title on the
| continued part. Not to mention most of the article would be
| fluff anyway.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > It seems like their entire goal was to make actual content
| hard to find.
|
| _cough_ much of the current web _cough_
| ncmncm wrote:
| At the time people bought computer magazines _mainly for the
| ads_. The articles were filler. Newspapers, too: editors in
| newsrooms actually called the reportage "filler".
|
| BYTE differed in its filler being of typically better quality,
| but Computer Shopper was much, much bigger, and much more
| popular despite its execrable filler because it had more and
| better ads.
| notorandit wrote:
| I wish I had the same quality contents ...
| VonHelsing wrote:
| pg. 401 has an interesting article on software by some guy named
| William Gates.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Never heard of him. I'll bet getting an article published in
| Byte must've felt like his crowning achievement.
| rahen wrote:
| Page 50: "A compromise between assemblers and high-level
| languages, C helps programmers avoid the idiosyncrasies of
| particular machines".
|
| Interesting. I thought C appeared as a (very) high level language
| back in 1983, when development on microcomputers was still mostly
| done in assembly. This article was published August 1983 and
| Turbo Pascal v1.0 was only released in November, so I'm not sure
| what high level languages were available on microcomputers back
| then, besides BASIC.
| blihp wrote:
| BASIC and (UCSD) Pascal were the mainstream choices on 8-bit
| micros... with BASIC being far and away the dominant language
| in the amateur and low-volume professional market mainly due to
| ease of use and that it came bundled with every 8-bit micro I
| recall using. On 16-bit micros that was around the time more
| powerful high-level languages started to become available (for
| example, XLISP was released in 1983. AmigaBASIC released in
| 1985 was quite powerful for its time). So you are correct that
| options were limited in '83 mainly because 8-bit micros were
| very, very storage (RAM and disk) constrained.
|
| It was commercial, student and hard core amateur, developers
| who developed in assembly in the 80's. C was only ever 'high
| level' when compared to assembly/machine code. Manual memory
| management was an indicator that it wasn't high level at all.
| That said, much commercial software was still written in
| assembly back then as that was the only way to wring the
| performance out of an 8-bit and even early 16-bit micros. It
| was the transition to 16-bit, when all that 6502/6800 code
| became obsolete when C really started to take over.
| hsnewman wrote:
| I was there in 1983, development was certainly not done mostly
| in assembly.
| pavlov wrote:
| Arguably the most important commercial applications on the
| IBM PC were written in assembly: Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect.
|
| It was a competitive advantage early in the 1980s, then
| turned into a handicap by the end of the decade when the
| performance and memory tricks didn't matter as much as
| graphics and GUI.
| ncmncm wrote:
| True: people rolled their eyes at anybody trying to field a
| commercially successful product not coded in assembly.
| Languages were for proofs-of-concept, and for toys. And
| yes, that changed as 1990 approached.
| unkeptbarista wrote:
| Ditto here. C, Pascal and Forth were what I was using in
| those days. I did some 6502, 6800 and 68000 assembly, but
| only when needed.
| not2b wrote:
| Likewise; I wrote a lot of Fortran in those days.
| angst_ridden wrote:
| There was a lot of BASIC, but at least on microcomputers,
| there was a lot of assembly (if you needed any performance).
|
| I was writing games, and there could be a bit of BASIC
| wrapper, but the rest was assembler.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| UCSD Pascal was widespread, fairly portable but expensive and
| slow. If there wasn't a FORTH for your machine you might write
| one for yourself.
| msla wrote:
| Logo definitely existed on micros in the 1980s.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)
|
| > Apple Logo for the Apple II Plus and Apple Logo Writer for
| the Apple IIe, developed by Logo Computer Systems, Inc. (LCSI),
| were the most broadly used and prevalent early implementations
| of Logo that peaked in the early to mid-1980s.
|
| > Aquarius LOGO was released in 1982 on cartridge by Mattel for
| the Aquarius home computer.
|
| > Atari Logo was released on cartridge by Atari for the Atari
| 8-bit family.
|
| > Color Logo was released in 1983 on cartridge (26-2722) and
| disk (26-2721) by Tandy for the TRS-80 Color Computer.
|
| > Commodore Logo was released, with the subtitle "A Language
| for Learning", by Commodore Electronics. It was based on MIT
| Logo and enhanced by Terrapin, Inc. The Commodore 64 version
| (C64105) was released on diskette in 1983; the Plus/4 version
| (T263001) was released on cartridge in 1984.[9][10]
|
| And so on.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| There was even an issue of Byte featuring Logo, August 1982.
| https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-08
| [deleted]
| lisper wrote:
| P-Lisp ran on an Apple II:
| https://archive.org/details/P-Lisp_v3.0.1
| WalterBright wrote:
| My first C compiler came out around then.
| sigsev_251 wrote:
| Are you Walter Bright, the creator of D? If yes, I was
| thinking of writing a proposal for WG14 some time in the
| future regarding slices/fat pointers. Would it be ok if I
| modelled it after the extension found in the betterC
| compiler, at least when it comes to syntax?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Yes, that's me. I even wrote an unofficial proposal for C
| slices!
|
| https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/C-biggest-mistake.html
|
| Feel free to model your work on this and/or on D as you see
| fit. It'd be great if you made it into an official
| proposal. That one thing will greatly benefit C programs,
| much more than any of the other improvements in the C
| Standard I've seen over the years.
| sigsev_251 wrote:
| Thank you for your answer and the inspiration! I'll try
| my best!
| WalterBright wrote:
| I can help with review and defense of it, too.
| intrasight wrote:
| In 1983 I programmed in both assembly and in C - and usually
| flipped back and forth between the two by using the assembly
| output of the C compiler. My experience was that C was a low-
| level language in that you could fairly easily see how that C
| was transformed into the assembly. It was a great way,
| actually, to learn assembly.
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| I bet you would have killed for Compiler Explorer
| (godbolt.org) in the '80s. Actually, I wish I could integrate
| it directly into my editor today. (Well, preferably something
| running locally rather than a web service.)
| projektfu wrote:
| Try RMSbolt.
|
| Not really compatible with Windows though.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-09-09 23:00 UTC)