> In ye olden times, the C standard was considered guidelines rather than a ruleset, undefined behavior was closer to implementation-defined behavior than dark magic, and optimizers were stupid enough to make that distinction irrelevant. On a majority of platforms, dereferencing a null pointer compiled and behaved exactly like dereferencing a value at address 0.

> For all intents and purposes, UB as we understand it today with spooky action at a distance didn’t exist.

The first official C standard was from 1989, the second real change was in 1995, and the infamous “nasal daemons” quote was from 1992. So evidently the first C standard was already interpreted that way, that compilers were really allowed to do anything in the face of undefined behavior. As far as I know