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by cmrdporcupine 1482 days ago
It was just the way things were back then. Compilers were expensive too. In the late 80s I saved up my allowance money for months to buy a Modula-2 compiler for my Atari ST. I still remember reading the manual on my way home from the city, floppies in hand.

In the 80s there was a vibrant shareware & public domain scene, but 'open source' wasn't nearly what it is today, and shareware & PD things were mostly utilities, etc. That really took off in the early 90s with the advent of Linux, the Internet, FTP sites. Some of the GNU stuff existed in the late 80s but was mainly only of use to academics until Linux came on the scene.

The upside of the way things were is that lots of people seemed to make somewhat reasonable livings as individual businesses selling software they'd made. People who would be sinking their time into open source projects now were often sinking their time into software that they sold by mail order or through user groups, etc.
2 comments
Gibbon1 1482 days ago
The other thing I remember about 80's compilers is a lot of the vendors wanted to drink your milkshake too. They had licensing fees for every unit you shipped. Basically meaning they wanted a cut of your gross revenue.
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rwmj 1482 days ago
To be fair, this particular compiler was relatively cheap. The number £30 springs to mind (which included the book), but I'm not sure if that was the price or just my faulty memory. The internet wasn't a thing for home users in 1989.

Only a couple of years later I had access to the internet and was downloading DJGPP. Fun fact is I now work with DJ.

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actually_a_dog 1481 days ago
Yeah, I noticed that, too. $20 for a compiler seems ridiculously cheap, even for 30-40 years ago prices. I would have thought it would be more like $200.
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marcodiego 1482 days ago
> Fun fact is I now work with DJ.

Would you mind to tell us what you do? I can only imagine legacy or a mix of legacy and highly specialized niches using DJGPP nowadays.

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rwmj 1482 days ago
DJ is a well-known compiler developer at Red Hat who is also working on Arm and RISC-V support (https://www.delorie.com/users/dj/). I work at Red Hat on Arm & RISC-V (amongst a few other things).
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marcodiego 1482 days ago
Ah... right... you work with DJ, the person!

I thought you used DJGPP on your work.

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