| > Having to pay for a compiler sounds a little funny through the lens of 2022; I wonder if the majority of people buying these software/packages at the time found the idea strange, too. Nope. I have, right here on my desk somewhere[1], the CDROM for the Watcom C/C++ compiler that came with an IDE and the watcom assembler wasm. IIRC correctly, the IDE had a Vi mode and it came with a make that was much better than the nmake from Microsoft. I remember buying it for a relatively large sum back in 1996 or so. I did not think it strange to pay money for a C and C++ compiler + assembler that allowed me to produce Windowed applications, device drivers and netware modules, that came with an IDE (with Vi-compatible bindings), as well as make. There was tons and tons of documentation as well (Windows help files), more than I'd ever seen before in my life. It had enough documentation on that disk to take you from "Never used C++ before" to "expert C++ developer". It assumed that google and stackoverlflow did not exist, and so it answered any question you could possibly have had. It also had samples for all the major things, so you could easily start a device driver project (for example) just by copying the samples. Honestly, it seemed like great value for money to someone who had no internet. |