Re: Re=Fun_with_History why_wasnt_Ada83_object_oriented

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

<tmoran@acm.org> wrote in message news:ji8vlq$5d3$1@speranza.aioe.org...
>>  The obvious repercussion of this is that there weren't any cheap
>>  compilers (say, in the US$50 - US$100 range) that you could run on
>>  your PC at home, so no one could experiment with the language.  Ada
>>  essentially missed the boat in the PC revolution, and so was never
>
>  The obvious lesson here is that advertising is supreme.  There was
> in fact a $100 Ada that ran on DOS machines - I know because I bought
> it to try out this new language named Ada.  I think the ad I saw was in
> Byte magazine, but it surely wasn't as much press as Lotus or Ovation(?)
> the never-did-exist system described in a cover article.

Besides that ;-), RRS started out on PCs before they were called PCs. We 
sold our first compilers for CP/M. We called them "Janus" because we really 
didn't have any intent of doing full Ada, and thus didn't want to promise 
that. But we had more trouble with people claiming to own the name "Janus" 
than anything to do with the DoD. Thus we quickly changed to "Janus/Ada", 
which it has been ever since. Also note that there were several competing 
"Ada" compilers advertised (not all sold) at the time.

Note that the DoD's supposed trademark proved to be unenforcable. On top of 
that, they had to let us use the name after they had let Telesoft and a 
variety of other companies market subsets. Can't treat a smaller business 
differently.

In any case, we were selling $99 compilers before Turbo Pascal even came out 
(but after some other low-cost compilers). The lack of inexpensive compilers 
was not the reason that Ada was not used more on PCs; I think it was more 
that other languages were more promoted and built up better ecosystems. I 
recall being very frusterated that people would create and try to sell that 
22nd C utility library when creating the first such library for Ada (a 
language much better suited to reusable libraries anyway) would almost 
certainly have been more profitable for them. (Me-too products never make 
much money.)

                                            Randy.