[defrost]

I did a lot of cross platform development work from 1982 onwards and 1987 was very much the year of C for Intel | DOS machines - they were cheap (comparitively), widely available and Borlands Turbo C was a fully integrated IDE that was affordable (and|or pirated) with some outstanding manuals.

Between that and their ASM for low level work, C took off in a big way and Pascal sharply dwindled in popularity (although it still hung on for a long time, even up to the present).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Turbo_C

There were better more expensive tools, but that was the product that planted a flag for widespread C development.

[pjmlp]

In Europe, in a MS-DOS world without cross-platform considerations, it took until Windows 3.x release, and Watcom C++ with its DOS extender for folks to really care about C and C++.

In fact, we used Turbo C 2.0 to prepare our code samples to deploy them into a single Xenix computer shared across the whole school, and that was it, nothing else.

[defrost]

Watcom was a much much better compiler and was welcomed with open arms to be sure - I still have a copy of the last release and use it on occassions.

If we're waxing historic here, my first C compiler (of my own and not a university VAX | PDP version) was the Cain | Hendrix Small C compiler (released 1980) which I handcopied in 1982 and extended over the next year or three as I read the Dragon books and other works .. bit of a side exercise while doing an engineering degree and working on a sheep shearing robot.

Thank-you Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-C