| Not at all. At the time, only people at universities and major tech companies had access to the net and what little free software existed. The Borland and Microsoft compilers costs hundreds. Power C was a godsend to impoverished students, and as noted by others, the book alone was worth the price they were charging for the whole package. It was just outstanding. While I did have access to the net, it was only over a 1200 bps dialup modem. Downloading something like gcc over that took...a while. The alternative was to bring a stack of floppy disks to school, and laboriously split anything big into chunks that would fit on a floppy. I still remember when a friend of mine who worked for the university computer labs took the trouble of downloading all the floppies (> 20, IIRC) that let you work your way up to having a running version of this weird Finnish thing called "Linux" (the term "distro" didn't exist then). I got him to make me a set, and never looked back. Even if you did have gcc, at that time it didn't support a lot of the stuff you needed to make professional-level MS-DOS software -- none of the graphics functions to build what passed for a decent UI at the time, no memory models (which sucked, big-time, but you needed to use and understand them), etc. I still count Power C to be among the wisest purchases I ever made, along with a copy of K&R 1st edition. Between those two, you were golden. This concludes this edition of crochety grandfather talking about "In my day". :-) |