[jacquesm]

How much history can you try to rewrite in one comment?

A vast amount of software in C was written for other platforms than UNIX, both SGI and SUN were companies that were focused on selling hardware rather than software. If anything the workstation market was created by companies like Xerox and commercialized by companies like Apollo.

UNIX was for a long time a very expensive operating system on X86, it only became affordable with SCO/Xenix and it became free with 386BSD by Bill and Lynne Jolitz and later Linux by Linus Torvalds.

C definitely wasn't a UNIX only language, it was available for an enormous range of computers from 8 bitters to top of the line machines. In fact that (and not UNIX) was a major factor in C's long time dominance.

[pjmlp]

None, as I was there.

Companies buying UNIX weren't buying X86 systems to run it.

We were using CP/M (on Spectrum +3 A), MS-DOS, Atari, Amiga, C64, ZX Spectrum, MSX.

C was just yet another programming language, nothing special about it.

In fact the only reason to bother having a C compiler on those systems for my group of acquaintances, was to be able to bring home the work done in expensive UNIX computers at school.

C supporters are the ones that like to rewrite history by selling UNIX and C as if they were the genesis of systems programming and OSes.

[discreteevent]

Well when I started programming Windows 3.1 it was with Microsoft C 7 and the help of the Petzold book. At that time it seemed to be the main way of writing Windows programs, at least until Visual Basic 3 came out anyway. It wasn't just another programming language in the Windows world. It was the programming language.

[pjmlp]

I was using Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5 and Borland C++ 3.1 instead.

Also by the time Windows 3.1 got out MS-DOS was already at version MS-DOS 5.0 and DR-DOS at version 6.0.

During the lifetime of MS-DOS, many of us were happily coding on Clipper, Dbase, Turbo Pascal, Turbo Basic, Quick Pascal, TMT Pascal, FoxPro, NASM, TASM, Turbo C, Turbo C++, Modula-2....

There was plenty of choice.

[discreteevent]

Not to be pedantic but I know there was a lot of choice for DOS but I was referring to Windows programming specifically which is what I started out on. I was under the impression that C was the main way to do this but I didn't even have access to the internet then, so I suppose I should say that it seemed to be the main way to do Windows programming in my local area and in my local computer bookshop!

[bluGill]

You are looking at the 1990s, not the 1970s and early 1980s when this was taking place. By the late 1980s Microsoft realized they needed a higher level language and C was already winning by then. Microsoft just helped push it along.