Comment by vaxman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vaxman | Hacker News Reader

Mind. Blown.

On DEC systems, I programmed using FORTRAN, BLISS, MACRO and (on GiGi and RSTS/E) in BASIC for a long time.. then one day the Bell Labs spinoff I worked for bought a Whitesmith’s C license for the VAXcluster (for probably oodles of money) and I was transferred into a group headed by the guy who wrote UNIX’s malloc implementation a long time before I came along. He hated VMS as much as I hated C. He couldn’t use UNIX because it only ran on dogshit computers. I couldn’t use FORTRAN because someone read a book that said C was cool. We all carried around our K&R pamphlet books and the Whitesmith’s manual (which the Indian workers would mispronounce with three syllables lol). The compiler had all kinds of issues on VMS. Eventually, DEC released VAX-11 C (still have my little 5x7” orange book) and that was enough to make me give up (the truly wonderful) VAX FORTRAN and MACRO/BLISS compilers. My home setup (it was not common for anyone to have home setups then, even programmers) was all assembler, FORTH, Pascal and BASIC but with the shift to C at work, I finally sold a kidney and bought Lattice C and later Aztec C and after moving to the Mac (as I sealed my Amigas into the boxes in the garage where they remain to this day), MPW C, THINK C and CodeWarrior C, MS Visual C, before Yggdrasil Linux…GNU C, then GNU Objective C and now (needle scratch silence) Swift? All started with Whitesmith’s C…

If any of those Amigas had a battery backed clock, please remove the batteries at the earliest opportunity and neutralise the area affected by any leakage with a mild acid such as lemon juice. They'll almost certainly have leaked by now but the longer it's left the worse the damage will be.

Absolutely this. The Varta batteries of the 1990s have inflicted awful irrepebal damage on many systems of the time. Especially sad when people thought they were keeping them safe in their attic and then unpacked them to find the motherboard full of dead components.

When I bought my Amiga, its clock battery had been replaced by a mount for a coin battery. That machine had received some serious love.

By now, that's the least of the concerns. If they use linear PSUs with massive electrolytic capacitors, I'll bet they're toast (dried or leaking, and so far outside of spec). And anywhere with any amount of humidity without desiccant packets and sealed in plastic will experience corrosion of PCBs and connectors.

I was lucky enough to work for Manx Software starting, I believe, in 1988. So I not only had free access to all of the Aztec C products, but also learned tremendous amounts from being able to see and work on the source code itself.

I also ended up being a VI guy because Manx had their own vi implementation…

Memories indeed.

Ahh... memories. I first learned C on an Amiga with Lattice C (which turned into SAS C.) My A500 was souped up with a HD and extra memory.

> Eventually, DEC released VAX-11 C

A bit raw, with floating point bugs in libm ...

I'm old. I instantly recognized your username.

I’m getting there, but I was trapped in a movie that wouldn’t be made for another five years… https://clip.cafe/the-secret-of-my-success-1987/why-are-wear...

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