XT 5160

[John Foust]

At 04:15 AM 5/6/2005, Fred N. van Kempen wrote:
>I remember using a very much UNIX-like C environment for DOS,
>called "Manx C".  It was small, has the usual "make-cc-as-ld-ar"
>setup, and produced nice code.  What happened to them?  This was
>around ~84 or so..

Nitpick: Manx Software was the company, "Aztec C" was the product,
but it often became "Manx C" in conversation.  I think they closed 
up shop in the mid 90s.

At 05:56 AM 5/6/2005, Ethan Dicks wrote:
>I remember them in the 1986-1990 timeframe with their Amiga product. 
>They were competing with Lattice (later SAS) C.  I personally went
>with Lattice for several reasons, none of which I can recall right
>now.  I do remember that Manx did embedded assembly just different
>enough from Lattice that it was not trivial to port from one to the
>other.  Makefiles were different, too.

Back in the Amiga days, both Lattice and Manx were small enough
that the guys who wrote the compilers would hang out at the developer
conferences, so we all knew Jim Goodnow, the main brains behind
their C compiler.  Same for the original guys at Lattice and
the later SAS team at Lattice.  They were always showing off their
latest features in order to entice developers to switch.

Many developers owned Lattice because it was the first officially
supported compiler.  Jim was quick to come up with many features 
that outpaced Lattice.

I remember Jim explaining how they got started with cross-compilation
on a PDP-11, moving into the 6502 market with Apple II, and Z-80
undr CP/M, then to the 68000 market with Mac, Atari and Amiga, 
as well as a PC version.

The first developer kits for Amiga included the Lattice PC-hosted 
cross compiler.  Inside Amiga, there were also Sun and Stride hosted 
systems, too.  I remember editing and compiling on a Compaq luggable,
then sending my executables over the serial port.  Compilation
on one- or two-floppy Amiga systems was a real pain.  

- John