3 ms·
It was more than just the popularity of Unix. A while back, I ended up following a link on HN and reading a bunch of old computer magazines. I came across an a
by rpeden 9y ago
It was more than just the popularity of Unix.
A while back, I ended up following a link on HN and reading a bunch of old computer magazines. I came across an article by Peter Norton (in PC Magazine) from around 1986 or 87. In it, he discussed why C was rapidly displacing Pascal among DOS programmers.
Not that Unix didn't have an effect, but as DOS and then windows exploded in popularity in the 80s, C displacing Pascal there played a big role in Pascal's overall decline vs C.
edit: I think this is the article I'm thinking of:
https://books.google.ca/books?id=NZrPkWywRXgC&pg=PA75&lpg=PA75#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.ca/books?id=NZrPkWywRXgC&pg=PA75&lpg=PA...
- pjmlp 9y agoIn those days without Internet and expensive dial-up access to BBS limited to 5 simultaneous users, it depended very much where in the globe we are talking about. On my area in Portugal, using C was mostly for university projects. For anything else we were using Turbo Pascal and Assembly, with Clipper for business applications. Actually many MS-DOS systems programming books had code listings in C, Pascal and Assembly.