40 years ago was the home computer revolution. A lot of computers did not work like that. They had things like segmentation, zero pages, workspace register fi

40 years ago was the home computer revolution. A lot of computers did not work like that. They had things like segmentation, zero pages, workspace register files, shadow registers, BCD arithmetic, and software interrupts. A few years later they had things like heterogeneous multiple processors, PAD, and trap/interrupt gates. The big iron of the time (and a few years later) had some things that did not work like C, too, such as single-level storage addressing, tagged architectures, and capability-based addressing. Thinking that the C language is a representative model for computer history, or indeed for computer architecture, is a bad way of thinking of this. During the 1980s and 1990s there was a lot of shoehorning all of that architectural stuff into C compilers, with extra keywords and the like. (e.g. __interrupt, _Far, _Huge, __based, _Decimal, _Packed, digitsof, precisionof, and so forth)