C compilers of the 20th century running on Microsoft operating systems
There used to be a huge variety of C compilers available for sale under MS-DOS and later Microsoft Windows. A C compiler validation suite vendor once told me they had sold over 150 copies; a compiler vendor has to be serious to fork out around $10,000 for a validation suite (actually good value for money given the volume of tests in a commercial suite).
C compilers of the 20th century running on Microsoft operating systems would make a great specialist subject for a Mastermind contestant. The August 1983 issue of BYTE must be the go-to reference for C in the 1980s.
Here is my current list of compilers that were once and perhaps still are commercially available on Microsoft operating systems.
Aztec C: from Manx Software Systems.
Borland C: from Borland
IBM PC C Compiler: from Lattice???
CI-C86: from Computer Innovations.
CSI-C:…
DeSmet C:…
Digital Research C: Was this ever sold on a Microsoft OS?
Eco-C and Eco-C88 C:…
LCC: sold as a book in the 20th century, but its Microsoft OS implementations, such as lcc-win (with over 2 million copies distributed) and Pelles C, are really 21st century compilers.
Mark Williams C compiler: A US company having an entry in the German Wikipedia ranked significantly higher by Google than its English Wikipedia page shows that this compiler was a big success on the Atari ST (very popular in Germany) but not DOS/Windows.
Microsoft C: The compiler that nobody got fired for buying. Vendors had to try hard to generate worse code than this compiler (which some achieved, i.e., MIX) and also very hard to provide better the runtime support (which nobody ever could). Version 2 of Microsoft C was actually the Lattice C compiler.
MIX C from Mix Software
NDP C:…
Supersoft C:…
TopSpeed C: from Jensen & Partners International.
Watcom C: open sourced as Open Watcom
Wizard C: from Bob Jervis who sold (licensed???) it to Borland, where it became Turbo C.
Zorland C, Zortech C: from Walter Bright and my compiler of choice for several years.
If you know of a compiler that is missing from this list, or have better information, please let me know in the comments. Hopefully, I will start to remember more about long forgotten C compilers.
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