3 ms·

However, by that time, in the industry and academia, UNIX was starting to take hold, as was C. And on the PC, while UNIX hadn't yet arrived, C was rising in po

However, by that time, in the industry and academia, UNIX was starting to take hold, as was C. And on the PC, while UNIX hadn't yet arrived, C was rising in popularity: If you look at what systems programs, major applications, and videogames (probably the 3 most poplar applications on the PC at that point) were written in, the two most popular languages, AFAICT, were Assembler and C.

pjmlp 10y ago
C and Pascal were the Unity of MS-DOS, real games used Assembly. C's adoption for games started to increase around MS-DOS 5.0 got released, specially with Watcom C, 386 and DOS extenders. Doom was probably one of the first successful C based games. Of course on Windows 3.x commercial games were all C.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Yes, but in was starting to grab on. In fields less obsessed with performance, like applications software, it had already taken hold: Word was written in C in 1983, and DOS itself was in C as well, IIRC.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    No they weren't. MS-DOS was written in Assembly, just like Word for MS-DOS. Word got rewritten in C when it was ported to Windows. EDIT: You can see early versions here http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/microsoft-ms-dos-early-source-code/ http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/microsoft-ms-dos-early-... And the Lisa OS and the early versions of Mac OS were written in a mix of Assembly and Object Pascal. http://www.folklore.org/ http://www.folklore.org/ (Search for Pascal) http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2010/3/20_MacPascal_and_Think_Technologies.html http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      Ah. Sorry. Got that one wrong. My mistake... So maybe not in the early 80s, but by the 90s, when PCs had progressed beyond the point of assembler being a common language, C took off, partly due to limited resources, partly because that was what all the Big Iron folks were used to at that point.

pjmlp 10y ago

C and Pascal were the Unity of MS-DOS, real games used Assembly. C's adoption for games started to increase around MS-DOS 5.0 got released, specially with Watcom C, 386 and DOS extenders. Doom was probably one of the first successful C based games. Of course on Windows 3.x commercial games were all C.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Yes, but in was starting to grab on. In fields less obsessed with performance, like applications software, it had already taken hold: Word was written in C in 1983, and DOS itself was in C as well, IIRC.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  No they weren't. MS-DOS was written in Assembly, just like Word for MS-DOS. Word got rewritten in C when it was ported to Windows. EDIT: You can see early versions here http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/microsoft-ms-dos-early-source-code/ http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/microsoft-ms-dos-early-... And the Lisa OS and the early versions of Mac OS were written in a mix of Assembly and Object Pascal. http://www.folklore.org/ http://www.folklore.org/ (Search for Pascal) http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2010/3/20_MacPascal_and_Think_Technologies.html http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    Ah. Sorry. Got that one wrong. My mistake... So maybe not in the early 80s, but by the 90s, when PCs had progressed beyond the point of assembler being a common language, C took off, partly due to limited resources, partly because that was what all the Big Iron folks were used to at that point.