Comment by pjmlp
10 years ago
MS C compilers not only were worse than Borland ones, although they were the platform owner, their C compiler was the last MS-DOS C compiler to get a C++ cousin.
Sadly the way Borland managed the company, let to us having to move to VC++ with MFC, instead of BC++ with OWL or C++Builder and VCL.
Only now VC++ is catching up with C++ Builder for UWP apps.
On MS-DOS besides the DB stuff, everyone I knew was either using Assembly, or a mix of Turbo Pascal with inline Assembly.
C and C++ only came into play on last high school year, just before getting into the university, but the majority of us already had almost a decade of coding experience by then.
The really sad part is MS licensed Lattice for the first couple of versions of MS C, yet Lattice itself was markedly faster. If I remember right it didn't even come with any debugger though Lattice did (not sure about v1).
I took a real dislike to Windows and MFC and moved back to the Unix side of things, so my Win programming was pleaingly brief. :)
Your experience is almost the inverse of mine - we had a few juniors comng on with Pascal as they'd learnt that in uni, but they were easy to convert to C. Just about everyone I knew in those days were C/nix or C/DOS, with just a few hanging on still trying to make a living on the Amiga - mainly games devs.
I wasn't aware of the Lattice story, interesting.
Yeah, I guess in the old days before the Internet and with expensive BBS connections, the technology had more silos than nowadays, because it was harder to move masses for any given technology.