Perhaps my memory is not as good as I once thought it was. I had thought C compilers were shipped or provided gratis on most platforms until a short time before

Perhaps my memory is not as good as I once thought it was. I had thought C compilers were shipped or provided gratis on most platforms until a short time before Solaris. I could swear AIX did ship a compiler for a while, as I recall a time when I struggled to compile Emacs & GCC with AIX's compiler. Indeed, I remember even Windows NT had its compiler available for free (not Visual C++, just the NT compiler). I remember OS/2 didn't, and that earned it much scorn. I also have memories of GCC being ported to most platforms (and originally, it didn't really run on that many platforms) before the compilers stopped being available. Anyway, I really can't confidently stand behind those memories the more I think about it. The one thing I do remember was that when Sun stopped giving away their compiler, it was a big deal, and not helped by the fact that GCC struggled to match it's optimizer.