21 May
2020
21 May
'20
11:35 p.m.
Toby Thain <toby(a)telegraphics.com.au> wrote:
>
> - inexpensive compiler availability was not very good until ~1990 or
> later, but C had been taking off like wildfire for 10 years before that
PCC contributed to this. Everybody and their brother was porting Unix
to their fancy new CPU architecture / hardware. All you had to do was
bootstrap a cross-compiler version of PCC on a PDP-11 (or more likely
Vax), then get Unix to boot and Voila.
(I remember reading a paper about how Motorola did just that for
the MC 680x0 family.)
C and Unix were established in Academia and Industry well before 1990.
I get the impression that an important part of its
popularity was how C
(and C++) became the language of choice on the PC, and displaced Pascal in
the process.
C++ became the language of choice on the PC when MSFT started pushing
its compiler and Visual Studio IDE.
At least, this is my two cents.
Arnold