The Power C Compiler
mixsoftware.com
mixsoftware.com
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_reply_coupon
There's a whole host of old-school relics here--it is truly a blast from the past: paying separately for a debugger, paying for specific libraries, videos available on DVD.
It's really hard to express how deeply internet access has changed the landscape of ... well, everything, but in this particular case, the programming ecosystem. gcc probably existed back when I bought this compiler, and probably so did Borland's excellent pre-internet-era IDE, but I didn't know that. And so I bought this one.
I can't remember the year, but I had a Pentium 100MHz at home (with CD, which back then was optional).
You are absolutely right. There were tools, but knowing about them was a different story!
In the 80s there was a vibrant shareware & public domain scene, but 'open source' wasn't nearly what it is today, and shareware & PD things were mostly utilities, etc. That really took off in the early 90s with the advent of Linux, the Internet, FTP sites. Some of the GNU stuff existed in the late 80s but was mainly only of use to academics until Linux came on the scene.
The upside of the way things were is that lots of people seemed to make somewhat reasonable livings as individual businesses selling software they'd made. People who would be sinking their time into open source projects now were often sinking their time into software that they sold by mail order or through user groups, etc.
Only a couple of years later I had access to the internet and was downloading DJGPP. Fun fact is I now work with DJ.
Would you mind to tell us what you do? I can only imagine legacy or a mix of legacy and highly specialized niches using DJGPP nowadays.
I thought you used DJGPP on your work.
Oh, and it had a REALLY good manual and online help.
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 crazy expensive, until Turbo Delphi, which IIRC had two versions, one free that allowed commercial use but didn't allow installing custom components and a "cheap" (compared to the other versions) $500 version that allowed it, but it was based on the most unstable version of Delphi ever and CodeGear killed it anyway. In recent times they have the "Starter"/"Community" free edition but the license requires that you only have something like $5k / year income, otherwise you must buy at least the next bracket that is around $1700 or so.
Funny how when the entire programming tools industry was going towards more accessible tools, Borland/CodeGear/Embarcadero went the complete opposite direction.
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...
Free software and open source did a lot to change that. GCC for example. Linux becoming popular also helped. Then as interpreted languages became popular, with perl, python, etc., all free and under permissive licenses. Java was free for personal use then with commercial licenses IIRC? Even Microsoft started having "express" editions or compiler-only without IDE. I'd say by the 2000s decade compilers were no longer a cash cow.
But maybe it just turned out the real money is in the tools - you can get all of Microsoft's compilers for free, but they still charge you big $$$ for Visual Studio, and lots of developers apparently are happy to pay that price. Intel still charge big bucks for their compiler, but I have no idea how widely used it actually is or what Intel's thinking is.
It came with a thick book, the reference manual for all C functions. That book alone was worth paying for.
Mix C was not that great, it miscompiled stuff on a regular base. I debugged a problem for a day before finding out the compiler sometimes flat out ignored basic constructions like i++
One day I found out about djgpp, and even it cost me as much as Mix C in phone costs, I never looked back. Quality was so much better. Still used that reference book a long time, though.
The Borland and Microsoft compilers costs hundreds. Power C was a godsend to impoverished students, and as noted by others, the book alone was worth the price they were charging for the whole package. It was just outstanding.
While I did have access to the net, it was only over a 1200 bps dialup modem. Downloading something like gcc over that took...a while. The alternative was to bring a stack of floppy disks to school, and laboriously split anything big into chunks that would fit on a floppy.
I still remember when a friend of mine who worked for the university computer labs took the trouble of downloading all the floppies (> 20, IIRC) that let you work your way up to having a running version of this weird Finnish thing called "Linux" (the term "distro" didn't exist then). I got him to make me a set, and never looked back.
Even if you did have gcc, at that time it didn't support a lot of the stuff you needed to make professional-level MS-DOS software -- none of the graphics functions to build what passed for a decent UI at the time, no memory models (which sucked, big-time, but you needed to use and understand them), etc.
I still count Power C to be among the wisest purchases I ever made, along with a copy of K&R 1st edition. Between those two, you were golden.
This concludes this edition of crochety grandfather talking about "In my day". :-)
I think it was at least half a dozen floppies. It also came with a huge set of documentation.
I think the Amiga collapse not too long after I bought the compiler. Maybe the declining sales of the Amiga is what the authors decide to sell the compiler relatively cheaply. Matt Dillon wrote the compiler, and subsequently went on to create DragonFly BSD.
I still look upon my "Amiga years" fondly. I moved to Linux in late 1994...
Nope. I have, right here on my desk somewhere[1], the CDROM for the Watcom C/C++ compiler that came with an IDE and the watcom assembler wasm. IIRC correctly, the IDE had a Vi mode and it came with a make that was much better than the nmake from Microsoft.
I remember buying it for a relatively large sum back in 1996 or so. I did not think it strange to pay money for a C and C++ compiler + assembler that allowed me to produce Windowed applications, device drivers and netware modules, that came with an IDE (with Vi-compatible bindings), as well as make.
There was tons and tons of documentation as well (Windows help files), more than I'd ever seen before in my life. It had enough documentation on that disk to take you from "Never used C++ before" to "expert C++ developer". It assumed that google and stackoverlflow did not exist, and so it answered any question you could possibly have had.
It also had samples for all the major things, so you could easily start a device driver project (for example) just by copying the samples.
Honestly, it seemed like great value for money to someone who had no internet.
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.
I had to buy a dev PC: a PC-AT 286 with a toggle switch on the back that allowed it to run a 6MHz or 8MHz; a 60MB Priam hard drive - one of the fastest available; and I think it had 2MB of RAM, though of course you could only use 640K with the rest usable as a RAM disk or disk cache. I think it was around $2500. For reference, IBM's PC-AT system at the time (1984) was $4K-6K with a 20MB drive:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer/AT
The Realia compiler was something like $1200 and the screen library was around $450 I think. They're apparently still selling ScreenIO, though now for Windows:
http://www.screenio.com/purchase.htm
Computer Associates bought the Realia company, abandoned the product, and focused on porting mainframe COBOL applications to the PC.
I didn't make much on the initial deal, but charged $500/year for maintenance and they ran the thing for over 15 years. My main goal was to get a fast PC: I had been reading Byte and PC Magazine for a few months and this was a way to get one without me plunking down a lot of cash.
I think it's kinda cool that a small company like Realia (out of Chicago) could create something like this and have a functioning company for many years with paid employees. Yeah, open source is great in some areas, but in some ways it is not so great. A few geniuses could not have a sustainable compiler business these days, no matter how great the software.
Not at all. Pretty much all software at the time was commercial or, at most, shareware. Pre-web, selling binaries to people to run on their computers was just how one made money as a software developer.
That professional tools in particular were fairly expensive software packages (CodeWarrior, a few years later, was several hundred dollars. Power C was dirt cheap at $20) seemed completely normal. A carpenter isn’t handed a full workshop worth of saws and chisels gratis, after all. If I wanted to be paid to make software, just as obviously the professionals who made the compiler did, too.
(it’s really difficult to convey how incredibly good all of the documentation and examples that came with some of these products were, too. Think C (back when symantec sold compilers and wasn’t a fourth-rate antivirus vendor) came with thousands of pages of physical manuals teaching you everything from the fundamentals of programming to exhaustively documenting their libraries, with wall charts of class hierarchies etc. Pre-internet this stuff was worth it’s weight in gold)
When it talks about compilers, the c/c++ compiler suite was price at like 4 k$… although supposed/allegedly (that is, according to ibm marketing) it won over 4x over gcc (in the performance of the generated code i guess).
https://hpc.llnl.gov/software/development-environment-softwa...
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.
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.
If they’re gone, who’s still paying the bill for hosting, and why? Just for fun to preserve a time capsule? Did they prepay for hosting for 30 years, and the site will disappear one day?
If I had to assume, they probably still have some limited sales, support and consulting (ex. schools with teachers used to old software? companies with unusual development environments?).
While looking for Mix Software, Inc., though, I found their official(?) YouTube channel with the introductions for their C [0] and C++ [1] courses uploaded 8 years ago. They definitely have that old 90's VHS feeling to them, complete with music, early 3D animations and everything.
It would seem that the MIX C compiler for CP/M 80 got preserved at some point, too! [2] I'd need to look into it, but this looks promising.
[0] https://youtu.be/ikTh2JQbkls
I wanted to learn how to make .exe files but at the time had no resources or contacts on how to even start. This book and compiler was what launched my entire career.
It allowed you to do inline assembly as well which was a lot of fun on an old DOS machine. I'm pretty sure my brother and I hit every possible way to lock up the computer or have it spontaneously reboot since we didn't really understand memory management. Lots of fun trying to make video games and putting the vga card into Mode13 or ModeX as well. Good times.
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.
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 twos complement wasn't common either?
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 operations that may have remainders beyond your desired number of digit precision, you need deterministic rounding or other rules to handle it.
If you're ever writing any code that handles money, DO NOT use just naively use float and double types in your code!
Floating point is out of the question, so division, multiplication, etc was more accurate in BCD than in integers when different currencies were involved.
If you can exchange arbitrary currency (and other commodity) in specified whole units with no other restrictions, then if you need to track prices, the prices need to be tracked as arbitrary rational numbers.
BCD is, of course, inadequate for that, but it's the most general reason for why monetary amounts may need fractions, IMO.
BCD does mean that when the requirements change from “we need to track to the cent” to “we need to track to the mil”, you change one constant as to the minimum allowed precision, and no other code or existing data. Whereas “use integer multiples of the minimum unit” makes that messier. Also, if you have different minimum units in different parts of an enterprise, using BCD makes sharing between them easier.
balance 91.31 [+291310]
+1000.00 [+410000] temporary credit
balance 1091.30 [+410913] ULP lost
-1000.00 [-410000] temporary credit deducted
balance 91.30 [+291300] successfully stole 1 cent
repeat on each account/transaction/etc
Decimal floating point should never be supported for anything in any capacity, and use of any floating point in financial software should be considered material proof of either gross incompentence or negligence, or intent to commit fraud.
Fixed point was still common: Take an int and pretend the first X bits are after the point. You have to choose X wisely, so you have enough bits available both before and after the dot. This at a time when 16 bits was the common int size.
In financial spaces I used BCD extensively. Especially on embedded. IIRC, most of the older banking messages used BCD as well (card acquirer -> card issuer messages).
I found a couple of things to not ring true in what I'd read about the compiler, though. There were issues around a lack of error messages when students would send incorrect parameters to a function. If I remember correctly, I think that one could transpose the arguments in a call to fprintf() so that the FILE * reference was not the first parameter. A few of my students put a format string at the front, a few parameters, and then the FILE *. I believe that the version of Power C that we were using did not flag this as invalid. I question the ANSI compliance claim because of this and a couple other odd issues.
The other thing that didn't really ring true was the often-quoted line about loving the book and throwing away the compiler. Really, the book wasn't that great, in my opinion.
I do believe that one received more than their $20 worth of value from the offering, though. It was a nice enough compiler with a decent book.
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.
Except for the fact that I was 30 odd years younger and had a beautiful girlfriend, I don't long back for those times.
IIRC I managed to blow the stack with a recursive function 6 calls deep. Shortly after, I got a 486 and installed Linux (gcc worked much better)
So they didn't compete with Borland?
Back in the late 80's Portugal it was either Borland or Microsoft for MS-DOS, eventually we also became aware of Watcom, Metaware and Symantec.
https://9p.io/plan9/glenda.html
Then because it wasn't deemed professional enough, a marketing campaign was created for the current logo.