Compilers on old machines (was: C bug of the day)

[Vinzent Hoefler <ada.rocks@jlfencey.com>]

Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:

>Vinzent Hoefler fed this fish to the penguins on Wednesday 11 June 2003 
>04:08 am:
>
>> At least for 6502 and Z80 exist C-compilers, so I don't see why there
>> shouldn't be any Ada-Compiler. I even remember playing around with
>> Pascal and FORTH on a Z80 machine (around 1986).
>>
>        Rather late...

Hey, I was just a little twelve-year-old-boy at that time... :)

>My TRS-80 was being replaced with an Amiga in that time 
>frame.

Well, in the GDR (aka. East Germany) such stuff was quite hard to get
and if so, it was damn expensive. Some of my friends were *very* proud
of their C64's.

>        My TRS-80, in 1982/83, was running Alcor Pascal, Supersoft LISP, and 
>Misosys Pro-MC (a K&R C that may have started life as LC, and the 
>latter was a Small-C variant). 64KBytes (of which the OS sucked up 
>about 8KB), dual 180K floppies. Supersoft LISP actually ran on a 32K 
>machine with no disk drives, just an audio cassette.

Same here. Not actually LISP, I mean the cassette. Kind of fun to wait
for three minutes just to load the compiler.

>The OS had 
>features Windows still lacks (individual passwords on files, 7level 
>file access permission, automatic drive search [not really needed these 
>days] for files if no drive specified [or the default drive is 
>read-only and you open an output file], and a /job log/).

Pretty impressive for such small machines. At least compared with
today, where Pacman would need 3D-Hardware, a Gigaherz-CPU, at least
256 MB RAM to run, and would eat 500 MBytes of disk space. ;)

I like the small machines. Probably this is why I like doing things
with an 8 MHz-CPU that even a today's Pentium-IV couldn't reliably do
on Windows.


Vinzent.

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