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Comment by jmclnx | Hacker News Reader

>The Aztec C compiler would have originally be distributed on floppy disks, and is very small by moden standards.

If I remember correctly, Aztec C was from Mark Williams. It was also the basis for the c Compiler that came with Coherent OS.

But yes, things were far easier in the 80s, even on Minis which I worked on back then. These days development is just a series of Meetings, Agile Points, Scrums with maybe 2 hours of real work per week. Many people now tend to do their real work off-hours, a sad situation.

But I am looking for 1 more piece of hardware, then I can set up a DOS Machine to play with myself :)

>The Aztec compiler pre-dates ANSI C, and follows the archaic Kernigan & Ritchie syntax

I still do not like ANSI C standards after all these years.

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While we're ranting don't forget developers in the 80's didn't sit in a noisy open space!

This was totally me ~15 years ago in a Scrum place with an open floor plan, doing most of my work after everyone left in the evening or on holidays because it was quiet and I could finally get some stuff done. I wrote big pieces of the product by myself.

My first C compiler was on a VAX. I did have some C compiler for my ZX Spectrum at some much later point but I don't remember doing much with it. Then a series of compilers for PCs. One random memory is some sort of REPL C, maybe Interactive-C or something? But pretty quickly it was Microsoft and Borland.

EDIT: On a more serious note re: meetings and such. Part of the difference is that working in much larger teams and projects becomes less efficient and requires more communication. Mature projects also require less of the builder thing and more of the maintainer thing. Software lasts a long time and inevitably maintenance becomes the work most people end up doing.

That sounds familiar so I looked it up[0]. I used Mark Williams C compiler on the Atari ST--eventually settling on Megamax C as it ran better on my small floppy-based machine.

Computing was a smaller world back then, the company was founded by Robert Swartz (father of Aaron Swartz) and named after his father William Mark Swartz.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Williams_Company

These days development is just a series of Meetings, Agile Points, Scrums with maybe 2 hours of real work per week.

Think about early video game development at large companies: One person (maybe two), six months. The company gave them room to practice their art, and the result sold a million copies.

These days everyone wants to cosplay Big Tech and worship abstraction layers, so you can't get all of the "stakeholders" in the same meeting in six months.

> Many people now tend to do their real work off-hours, a sad situation

It's the only practical approach when offices are designed to be distracting and productivity-killing, meetings are incessant, and groupware delivers a constant stream of interrupts which one is expected to monitor and respond to quickly - especially while working remotely.

> If I remember correctly, Aztec C was from Mark Williams. It was also the basis for the c Compiler that came with Coherent OS.

That would have been "Mark Williams C", also marketed as "Let's C" for MDSOS.

Yup. Let's C was the cut-down version of MWC86, with no large-model support. This limited you to 64K code and 64K data. I got a copy of it one Christmas, but never used it much because of this limitation.

Correct, that was it, "Lets C".

Back in the early 90's, before Linux took off, I ran Coherent. It came with incredible documentation, and I still remember the huge book with the shell on it.

And you're absolutely right about all the agile bull...

I loved Coherent, and I still have the “shell” book. It was one of the best things about using those tiny machines.

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