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Yes, it’s difficult these days to imagine the software situation of the early 1980s: how little software there was, how expensive it was, and how much effort wa
by pavlov 4y ago
Yes, it’s difficult these days to imagine the software situation of the early 1980s: how little software there was, how expensive it was, and how much effort was spent on copy protection that sometimes prevented legitimate customers from using it.
I was just reading a book called “Almost Perfect”, a first-hand history of WordPerfect by one of the founders. He mentions that they bought an IBM PC when it came out and wanted to port their word processor (over from the Data General minis that had been their initial platform). But they had to wait five months for an assembler to become available.
Imagine buying a $5,000 computer and you can’t even get an assembler for it for any money.
(WordPerfect was written entirely in x86 assembly, even when it was a billion-dollar product.)
- kragen 4y agoWriting an assembler for the 8086 doesn't take five months! Especially if you have a Data General mini to run it on, which already had an assembler and scripting with domacros. In fact, if memory serves, RDOS had FORTRAN, ALGOL, and BASIC available, even if most of the system software was written in assembler. Writing an assembler in BASIC on either the Nova or the IBM PC would have been considerably less hassle than writing it in assembly and hand-assembling it.
- pavlov 4y agoPresumably they didn't want to spend programmer time writing their own macro assembler when they knew others are working on a commercial product. The DG version of WordPerfect was shipping already, so they probably rather spent the time on improving that and waited for the PC-DOS ecosystem to evolve a bit.
- kragen 4y agoThat's my inference, yeah.