VOGONS

Search

Common searches

discuss: history of earliest language compilers for dos

Topic actions

First post, by noshutdown

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

basic: this was obviously dominated by micro$oft, which has a long history of basic products before the release of ibm pc. however, i am surprised that the ibm bascom(obviously rebadged from micro$oft) 1.0 wasn't released at the first moment with ibm pc, as they already have rombasic/basica provided by micro$oft.
pascal: while borland turbo pascal dominated for most of the time, micro$oft's product was much earlier, rebranded as ibm pascal and released at the first moment of ibm pc.
c: this seemd far more messy than other languages in early years of dos, probably due to lacking of standard like ansi c. lattice c released in 1982 seemed to be quite famous and was rebranded as m$c 1.0/2.0, but 3.0 and later were micro$oft's own work, and it was not until then did ibm rebrand m$c as ibm c, almost 4 years after ibm pc's release. however, i really don't know much about other c compilers in the old days.

Reply 2 of 5, by Damaniel

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Newbie
Rank
Newbie

IBM also had a Cobol and FORTRAN compiler early in the DOS days (rebranded/OEM versions of Microsoft compilers, like their C and Pascal products), and I think they also had a Logo environment (though that wouldn't have been compiled).

Reply 3 of 5, by Jo22

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++
Errius wrote on 2020-02-21, 05:30:

I assume that the earliest DOS programs were straight ports of CP/M programs.

Turbo Pascal 3 was popular on both CP/M-80 and MS-DOS..
However, I believe TP also required a real CP/M computer with Z80 CPU, which became the defacto standard in CP/M world.
Users of outdated 8080s, 8085s and so on couldn't use TP so they maybe used something else. ALGOL60, FORTRAN, LOGO.. 😉

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 4 of 5, by noshutdown

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

basic: dominated by micro$oft for most of the time. when turbo basic came up it posted a serious challenge, but then borland gave it up, rumored to be a deal of leaving basic to micro$oft and pascal to borland. vb.net is still the dominant basic today, although powerbasic and freebasic exists.
pascal: micro$oft was the first to come, but turbo pascal soon took over, and micro$oft eventually gave it up. but after so many years even delphi is fading out.
c: initially a chaotic market and micro$oft was one of them, then turbo c and borland c++ owned everyone for some years, but micro$oft persisted and eventually came back with vc. watcom used to be the choice of compiling performance-critical games and intel is now in that position, but gcc and llvm has also taken noticable market share.

Go to top of page Go to top of page
Back to Software
Close window
Close window