XT 5160

[Fred N. van Kempen]

On Fri, 6 May 2005, John Foust wrote:

> 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.
Yes, sorry.  It was Aztec.  Very neat little compiler.  On more
thought, it did NOT have a Make included, I believe I stole the
one from Borland, or some PD make.

> 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.
Gawd, I would love a copy of that compiler again, especially if
they used the (more or less same) codebase for several backends,
most of which I use ;-)

--f