3 ms·
One of the big difficulties with programming on 8-bit machines was that if you wanted to use anything other than the built in Basic, compilers were generally ex
by Mountain_Skies 5y ago
One of the big difficulties with programming on 8-bit machines was that if you wanted to use anything other than the built in Basic, compilers were generally expensive. Usually the cheapest alternative to Basic was Assembly, a huge leap for a self taught programmer to make.
Compilers for C, Pascal, and other languages of the time were hundreds of dollars, which was a lot for a (often young) hobbyist to pay. When I first heard about gcc in the early 90s, I was blown away because compilers in my head were something that only big corporations, universities, and the government could afford.
While there was no shortage of homebrew software in the 8-bit era, I have to wonder how much more there would have been if the major manufacturers of computers had made access to developer tools inexpensive and easy instead of letting the third-party market fill that role with small volume, high cost products.
64FORTH was relatively inexpensive ($40-$50) and might be another reason why the C64 had so much software developed for it.
- pjmlp 5y agoMost of the time it wasn't worthwhile anyway. Most 8-bit users had tapes, as disk drives were quite costly. Having a compiler was even less than 64 KB available, and neither Z80 nor 6502 were/are stack friendly architectures. So not only would one be swapping tapes all the time, there was much less memory available.
- tssva 5y agoWhether most 8-bit users had tapes depended on the market. In the US most users had floppy drives. Most stores carried little or no software on tapes.
- pjmlp 5y agoIn Europe, specially the markets dominated by Spectrum and Timex clones they were a rich boys thing. I think I never saw them on sale on my hometown, they had to be ordered from ads in computer magazines.
- tssva 5y agoI purchased my Commodore 1541 floppy drive at Kmart which I think is still barely in business. The more commonly known equivalent today would be Walmart. In other words they were common enough to be stocked at low end discount department stores. You can tell the difference between regions by watching retro computing YouTube channels. Those with North American creators generally use floppy drives or emulators with their retro equipment. European/UK creators are more likely to use tape or tape emulators and if they use floppies reference that they would have never been able to do so back in the day.
- jim_lawless 5y agoThere were C and Pascal compilers in the $50 - $60 price range for the C64, but they were often time consuming to use. The process of editing a source file, saving it, loading a compiler, compiling it to find errors, then re-loading the editor was tedious with a stock 1541 disk drive. ( Some editors had syntax-checkers built in to avoid having to exit the editor to find simple mistakes ... others used the BASIC editor to enter source with BASIC line-numbers. ) For me, tinkering with Forth on a C64 was attractive because I could interact quickly with the compiler, getting immediate feedback when I was toying with different concepts.
- jsymolon 5y ago> Compilers for C, Pascal, and other languages of the time were hundreds of dollars If you knew where to look, Tiny C was published in early Byte magazine (late 70's?) and Small-C published in Dr Dobbs, May 1980. I get nostalgic and peruse the early Byte ...
- mhh__ 5y agoIndeed. That feeling wrt to GCC (although way before my time) is why I always found the GNU/Linux meme a bit harsh. The GNU project moved heaven and earth to make free software a reality, I don't mind giving them credit.
- pjmlp 5y agoNo one really cared about GCC until Sun decided to split UNIX in user and developer editions, quickly followed by other vendors.