That was the way things were back in the 1980s. The only reason I managed to gain any experience programming in C on my Amiga is because one of my uncles bough

That was the way things were back in the 1980s. The only reason I managed to gain any experience programming in C on my Amiga is because one of my uncles bought me a $400 compiler to use (Aztec C). Things became easier in the 1990s as gcc improved and was ported to virtually every architecture on the planet. Richard Stallman was right to focus on a C compiler as a prerequisite to building the rest of the free software ecosystem.