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by hga 3833 days ago
Perhaps the more significant "accident" of history, occurring before IBM-PCs with much memory got out there in large numbers, was all the vendors of 68000 based systems who didn't follow the lead of Apollo Computer and instead got a relatively cheap UNIX(TM) licence.

As PCs got more capable and more and more people were willing to program them in C---I don't remember Borland being a big player in this, in fact, it was Microsoft that produced the first really solid C compiler---the same sorts of constraints that helped birth UNIX(TM) and C were in play, until it was by and large too late to change course.
2 comments
ArkyBeagle 3832 days ago
You're correct, but before Borland 'C' ( I think to directly compete with Microsoft ) much was done in Borland Pascal. Of course, much was done after as well.

I think the results of Apollo's decision speaks for itself. If something is an order of magnitude cheaper, it will propagate faster, whether it's objectively better or not.

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pjmlp 3832 days ago
Maybe I am a bit too much biased to Borland, but Microsoft MS-DOS compilers weren't that great, they were even the last MS-DOS compiler vendor to support C++.

They only started to have something worth buying with the 32 bit version of Visual C++ and Borland loosing their focus, until then not really.

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