[msbarnett]

> I wonder if the majority of people buying these software/packages at the time found the idea strange, too.

Not at all. Pretty much all software at the time was commercial or, at most, shareware. Pre-web, selling binaries to people to run on their computers was just how one made money as a software developer.

That professional tools in particular were fairly expensive software packages (CodeWarrior, a few years later, was several hundred dollars. Power C was dirt cheap at $20) seemed completely normal. A carpenter isn’t handed a full workshop worth of saws and chisels gratis, after all. If I wanted to be paid to make software, just as obviously the professionals who made the compiler did, too.

(it’s really difficult to convey how incredibly good all of the documentation and examples that came with some of these products were, too. Think C (back when symantec sold compilers and wasn’t a fourth-rate antivirus vendor) came with thousands of pages of physical manuals teaching you everything from the fundamentals of programming to exhaustively documenting their libraries, with wall charts of class hierarchies etc. Pre-internet this stuff was worth it’s weight in gold)