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> What Stallman did a decade later was great if you happened to have access to the type of computer that could run Emacs. Even then, you probably didn't own the
by fl7305 1y ago
> What Stallman did a decade later was great if you happened to have access to the type of computer that could run Emacs. Even then, you probably didn't own the machine and maybe even had to pay for time on it by the hour. The small machines that ran Microsoft Basic were in people's homes.
No, a decade later was at the end of the 1980's. At that time, many middle class families could afford home computers like the Atari ST, which could run many of the GNU compilers/tools.
It was a great learning experience porting Unix apps and games to the ST.
- criddell 1y agoAtari ST support wasn’t added to GNU C until 1993 with Multi TOS. It was largely the work of Eric Smith. You might be thinking of basic Motorola 68000 support which GNU C did have in the late 80’s but you couldn’t build a set of GNU tools that ran on the ST with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiNT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiNT
- fl7305 1y agoYou might be right that it wasn't GCC specifically. I think I was running a free/low cost version of OS-9 68K for the Atari ST, and managed to get hold of a proprietary C compiler for it. The combination of a "real" OS + C compiler made it possible to port the popular Unix text games of the time (empire, nethack, larn, etc). My point was more that the 68K home computers like Atari ST and the Amiga of the mid-to-late 1980s were powerful enough to "run emacs / C compilers", even if it wasn't the GNU stuff yet.