Comment by msie
14 hours ago
Well, I've been programming since 1986 and I had to buy all the compilers I used. For the Mac: Lightspeed Pascal, Lightspeed C and Metrowerks. I wish I had the money to buy MPW. Linux then was just a glint in Linus's eyes. We didn't have the internet with easy access to pirated software. I didn't do BB's so I don't know about that area. Once I went to uni in the 90's I started using Usenet but even then I didn't download any pirated software. Microsoft was virtually giving away Visual Studio/Visual Basic to University students. Back then I also remember reading Linus' arguments with Tanenbaum over microkernels and this funny language called Python and its creator unveiling/supporting it on Usenet. Around that time more and more tools were being offered for free and as a poor student I was delighted. Also we got access to free Unix tools since as we were doing work on Unix systems. Oh yeah, I remembered using this cool functional language called Miranda in one of my courses but was sad that it was a paid product. And then I heard about the debut of Haskell which was sort of a free answer to Miranda.
I remember paying something like $400-500 for Glockenspiel C++ for MS-DOS, which was based on AT&T's cfront and compiled to C code. Not long after that, Turbo C++ and Zortech C++ made things a lot easier, since they didn't compile through C, like cfront did. Those were in the $150-200 range, iirc. I also remember paying for PC-YACC from Abraxas, something like $400.