[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.