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The linked C source file is an excellent example of ancient C, when it was still more closer to high level assembly:

I assume that you are referring to the liberal use of “goto”. Of course, “if”, “while”, and even “switch” are also used. Quite the mix.

Directly calling into system calls (“write”) is interesting.

write(2) is POSIX. That's not "directly calling into a system call"; it's a normal C API from the POSIX header <unistd.h>.

The modern form of stdio only appear in Seventh Edition Unix.

And when buffer overflows were (attempted to be) avoided by guestimating a large enough buffer size.