You're taking me too literally. Of course we had assembly, etc. The kind of development we were working on was safety-critical real-time systems. So assembly i

You're taking me too literally. Of course we had assembly, etc. The kind of development we were working on was safety-critical real-time systems. So assembly is too low level, too risky, you want something more structured. But nothing academic, or insanely expensive. BASIC just isn't up for the task? How do you even write an ISR in BASIC anyways? We had to read two sensors and process a bunch of math every 500 usec, which was like 500 cycles. Every cycle count. C was for sure the best choice that fit the bill. Plus, everyone knew it. Many times you didn't even get a fully ansi compliant compiler (try writing C on a PIC micro without a software stack). So, for a while, C ruled in places that mattered. Low cost, performant, and people knew the language. Also, the compilers we used were purchased from small software vendors, and delivered by mail on floppy discs (this is before the internet took off). Like $3000 for the compiler, a big investment for a small company in 1995. This was back before semiconductor companies had low cost dev tools with free IDEs. The tools we had were state of the art, expensive, and powerful for their time. We grew to love them, and learned how to work with them better.