[ajross]

Not the Atari itself, which never had a C compiler. But systems like that, yeah. Lots of 70's systems were designed for non-ASCII or ASCII-subset[1] character sets, whereas Unix had made very comfortable use of every funny symbol it could find.

[1] e.g. the original Apple II character ROM had only the 64 characters from 0x20 to 0x5f (no lower case, even) squished into 6 bits of addressing. The keyboard reflected that limitation, as did those from Atari and Commodore. This wasn't rectified by Apple itself until the IIe, though there were 80 column cards on the market from 1980 on that implemented the full