Obsolete C for you and me

Posted Dec 9, 2023 15:35 UTC (Sat) by willy (subscriber, #9762)
In reply to: Obsolete C for you and me by Paf
Parent article: Modern C for Fedora (and the world)

Were people really writing significant amounts of C on bittyboxes like the Apple II? My background in that era was a lot of BASIC, some Pascal, some assembler. Fortran and C were for the Real Computers in the data centre.

Obsolete C for you and me

Posted Dec 9, 2023 15:50 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I dunno about significant, and I couldn't put a date on it, but early 90s I took over maintaining C programs running on PCs. That was Microsoft C 5. And we made extensive of use of overlays to get round the 640K/1M memory limit. So I guess there would have been quite a lot of PC C round about that time.

(That was the program(s) I set -W3 / -W4 on.)

Cheers,
Wol

Obsolete C for you and me

Posted Dec 10, 2023 1:30 UTC (Sun) by Paf (subscriber, #91811) [Link] (1 responses)

I don’t *think* so, but I wasn’t around for that - I’m in my 30s, I was just pretty sure several early personal computers lacked hardware FP because I vaguely remember when it started appearing in the 90s(?).

The point is just that with and without hardware FP both existed, I guess.

Obsolete C for you and me

Posted Dec 10, 2023 11:11 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Just to throw it into the mix, the minis I worked on had microcoded Fixed Point BCD. And it was fast, even if as the programmer you had to be careful to take care of the decimal point ...

Cheers,
Wol

Obsolete C for you and me

Posted Dec 10, 2023 3:11 UTC (Sun) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (2 responses)

Not so much, but it was certainly the case for Amigas and STs and only very high end versions of those had FPUs

Obsolete C for you and me

Posted Dec 10, 2023 3:19 UTC (Sun) by jake (editor, #205) [Link] (1 responses)

> but it was certainly the case for Amigas and STs and only very high end versions of those had FPUs

hmm, i wrote the code for my 3D graphics grad school class in C on an Amiga 1000 in 1986 or 7 ... i suppose it is possible that it was all software floating-point, but i certainly did not encounter any problems in that regard ...

jake

Obsolete C for you and me

Posted Dec 10, 2023 3:26 UTC (Sun) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

The A1000 was a 68000, which definitely had no hardware FPU. The first Amiga that shipped with an FPU by default was the A3000. Compilers would happily let you use floats and just fall back to software emulation for that.