I just wonder, why were there a ton of competing C/C++ Compilers, like these ones: Borland C++, GNU, IBM, IBM visualage, Metalware. And way more... What was the purpose if the market would be split into a million different parts with 0.01% people using one and the other 0.01% a different one and so on.
I'm not 100% sure, but software back then was more "boutique"... one or a few guys could program an app and sell it via mail order or retail or shareware etc... and possibly make a living doing it.
It wasn't a million pieces, regarding compilers probably a few dozens... Watcom, DJGP etc
Each had a niche or speciality, in the mid 90's with windows 95, Visual Studio took most of the market share because of win32 API, then MFC and continued that approach with .net then C#. MFC was bloated, so nearly 30 years of bloatware!
They taught compiler programming as part of computer science, so if there was a need somewhere, the skills were there to fill it.... today that low level skills are rare.
Targeting multiple platforms from one compiler, like this one was fairly common, watcom did it also. Apart from PC and Mac, this looks like it also targets 8bit and 16bit micros, so that was pretty cool coding in C rather than assembly, not sure how well that went in practise tho, but still a very impressive feature back then
So essentially, back then there were way more DOSes and Operating Systems, and each one needed their own compiler to be able to make code for it. Now Visual Code has took it all by storm because - Around the years of 2000, Windows was GIANT and I mean GIANT in bold letters. MacOS and Linux were tiny ants back then. Just look at this screenshot from a video about the OS market share in March 2000: Windows + MS-DOS...: 83.5% Just Windows... 74.8% Linux... 0.9% MacOS... 3.7% VMS, OS/2 and UNIX combined... 2.5%
Microsoft is still big now, even today the market share of windows is hanging around 72%, which is still a lot. Visual code for Mac was recently discontinued, don't know why but for 18% market share, It's a fairly good deal. But back then when 83.5% of market share for windows was there, the amount of programmers using Windows was massive and a lot of programs were made windows-exclusive. Since Microsoft Windows grew so large, it killed out the other Operating systems, and then microsoft made their own approved IDE which could also compile, coders were tired of not being able to see code errors in basic text editors, they switched to visual code and it became simpler and it just grew more.
Aztec C 5.x
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And way more... What was the purpose if the market would be split into a million different parts with 0.01% people using one and the other 0.01% a different one and so on.
It wasn't a million pieces, regarding compilers probably a few dozens... Watcom, DJGP etc
Each had a niche or speciality, in the mid 90's with windows 95, Visual Studio took most of the market share because of win32 API, then MFC and continued that approach with .net then C#.
MFC was bloated, so nearly 30 years of bloatware!
They taught compiler programming as part of computer science, so if there was a need somewhere, the skills were there to fill it.... today that low level skills are rare.
Targeting multiple platforms from one compiler, like this one was fairly common, watcom did it also.
Apart from PC and Mac, this looks like it also targets 8bit and 16bit micros, so that was pretty cool coding in C rather than assembly, not sure how well that went in practise tho, but still a very impressive feature back then
Windows + MS-DOS...: 83.5%
Just Windows... 74.8%
Linux... 0.9%
MacOS... 3.7%
VMS, OS/2 and UNIX combined... 2.5%
Microsoft is still big now, even today the market share of windows is hanging around 72%, which is still a lot. Visual code for Mac was recently discontinued, don't know why but for 18% market share, It's a fairly good deal. But back then when 83.5% of market share for windows was there, the amount of programmers using Windows was massive and a lot of programs were made windows-exclusive. Since Microsoft Windows grew so large, it killed out the other Operating systems, and then microsoft made their own approved IDE which could also compile, coders were tired of not being able to see code errors in basic text editors, they switched to visual code and it became simpler and it just grew more.