Comment by rhelz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rhelz | Hacker News Reader

When I read old articles like this, I start wondering what the story was behind all those companies mentioned. Stackworks Forth, Alan Ashley Assembler. You almost never hear of a company which is still around.

Was it actually possible, back then, to make a living selling Forth for CP/M computers? Or Assemblers? Did Stackworks have an office, with a jaded-looking middle-aged secretary who put out her cigarettes in an ashtray on her desk, before she picked up when the phone rang? A glad-handling salesman who came back to the office every few weeks before going out to sell?

I don't think it has been possible to sell a compiler which isn't a loss-leader in a bundle for what, 30 years?

Or were these side hustles? Alan Ashley, was his day job being a math teacher or something, and he did this to round out his budget?

The industry was a heck of a lot smaller back then, but these old articles mention way more different companies. Seems like before all these behemoth monopolies there was a lot more air to breathe.

'70s and '80s you would advertise in computer magazines. At the bottom of each ad as a little number, and in the magazine was a tear-out postcard that went back to the magazine. The postcard was filled with little numbers; you would circle the number associated with and ad, and the company would send you information about their company, price lists, etc.

The '70s and early '80s, it was CP/M, TRS-80, Apple ][ software. By the mid '80s and into the early '90s it was all one-person shops that were making custom UI controls for Windows 3.1. Tree and list controls were popular, plus some database connectors. By this time there were small companies making C++ libraries to make Windows programming easier, I remember Zinc and Zapp. They were wiped out when Visual C++ came out with Microsoft Foundation Classes.

The first developer tool I ever bought was Develop-64, an assembler for the Commodore 64 by a company called French Silk software. I was around thirteen years old and I figured this was some big professional company. Much later, I realised it was basically one guy and there was no way this was a full-time job. I think these tiny shops were pretty common back then, basically hobbyists trying to monetise their creations.

At the same time, disassemblers were handy tools for figuring out how things were done. Could be very learnful. Then they mysteriously went away for some reason.

It would depend on the generation of CP/M. CP/M 1.0 and 1.1 had Gary Kildall dealing with it when he came off duty from a nuclear submarine. CBASIC (from Compiler Systems aka Gordon Eubanks) dated from the same period and was also a part time activity for a nuclear sailor. CP/M 3.0 was mature - you had a lot of professional compiler companies like Prospero, Borland, FTL, and HiSoft, but by that stage. Some of them, like Prospero and HiSoft dated back to the CP/M 2.2 era, and I got the impression that they had three or four staff.

Thanks for the view back into history. I was kinda under the impression that this side-hustle thing was new. Apparently its not only old, but was an essential part of the technological progress we've had since then.

I knew some acquaintances back in the day (late 80s/early 90s) who had a company selling X servers. It wasn't a big operation (maybe half a dozen people total) and it worked out of a small office in the industrial section of Ft. Lauderdale (a fairly seedy looking neighborhood to say the least). But they made a decent living for maybe a decade or so and had some fairly big customers.

Commoditize your complement. If you sell operating systems, it pays to make compilers a commodity so that everyone can write programs for your operating system. This is true even if you aren’t “selling” the OS in the traditional sense of the word.

The alternative is a world where developer tools are expensive, and thus only the rich can program their own computer.

> I don't think it has been possible to sell a compiler which isn't a loss-leader in a bundle for what, 30 years?

I agree and personally feel that this is unfortunate and that we are in some ways imprisoned using mediocre to bad compilers by our collective refusal to pay for better ones.

i agree that we should have a better model as a society to produce things like compilers, but having a direct retail relationship with a closed source provider was pretty nasty.

because of tooling, large code bases, and weak standardization they had a huge amount of lockin. and only a single narrow funnel in which to address deficiencies.

and while certainly on a lower tier than EDA seats, werent super cheap. they usually had limited platform support. while they did optimize better for their targets, otherwise they were poorer systems than gcc, with all its warts.

Eh, the ones made by one or two people working part time and selling them as shareware weren't necessarily better than what we have available now. They may have been good enough for their time, but probably wouldn't cut it today.

And the ones made by corporations were prohibitively expensive. As a teenager wanting to learn, or a hobbyist making programs for fun, would you really pay $4500 for a compiler to tinker with projects in your spare time? There's one reason hardly anyone uses Delphi anymore. By the time they finally released a Community Edition, there was no community left that had grown up learning Pascal.

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