Tales of the C: Retro Thoughts on the Seemingly Eternal Programming Language

The C, she is a harsh mistress

Jun 11, 2025

My soul is full of longing
for the secret of the C,
and the heart of great code
sends a thrilling pulse through me.

- (Not) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I have here in front of me my copy of The C Programming Language, Second Edition that I bought in 1988 at the university book store while in college. The sticker shows a price of $30, which would be about $81 in 20251. This 272-page book is short and sweet, covering everything you need to know about the C programming language, at least back then.

C was created by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie in the early 1970s to help them build Unix. In those early days, C was primarily used by universities as it really needed the more powerful computers found there. Businesses were probably still locked into Fortran and Cobol as their primary languages.

Eventually as the students of the 70s moved into the business world and computers became more powerful, C became much more widely used.

The book itself is much like the language: small, simple and concise. The simplicity of C did not necessarily make it easy to use, however. It was not hard to “shoot yourself in the foot” with C’s minimal type checking and manual memory management. Still, what I really like about this book is that its concepts pretty much apply to any programming language. Sure, there’s no object-oriented content, but it describes the fundamentals well and provides a basis for understanding programming languages in general.

"We recommend writing only one statement per line, and using blanks around operators to clarify grouping." - from The C Programming Language

Of the primary languages I learned in college (Pascal, C, Schema and Lisp), C was definitely the most practical and useful when I moved on to the real world.

I also took a Fortran class as an elective because, why not?

Although I personally tended to prefer Pascal over C, mostly because of the stronger type checking, I would often use both. I first started using Pascal on 8-bit computers such as my trusty 800XL and the Apple IIgs2 I used in high school. Apparently it was somewhat easier to get a Pascal compiler running on a smaller 8-bit computer as I don’t recall seeing much in the way of C compilers for them.

Atari Thoughts on C

As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things retro. I love to sail forbidden Cs, and land on barbarous codes.

- (Not) Herman Melville

I remember there was a C compiler called Deep Blue C a version of Small-C that was sold through APX (Atari Program Exchange), but it was rather limited with many missing features of standard C. One weird thing about it was that because the Atari 8-bits did not have the “{“ or “}” characters, it had to use “$(“ and “$)” instead, making C code look even weirder than it already did.

I also think OSS had a C/65 product that compiled C into 6502 assembly. Neither of these products were much more than toys as I recall.

Eventually Lightspeed C for the Atari 8-bit was released and it was more full-featured, but using C on an 8-bit computer with its generally slow floppy drives and limited RAM was a tough sell.

That changed when the 16-bit computers such as the Atari ST appeared. The much faster speed and great RAM capacity made C much more viable and it quickly became commonplace. In fact, C was the primary programming language for the ST. The Atari development kit shipped with the Alcyon C compiler and much of the OS itself was written in C.

For a rather niche platform the Atari ST actually had a lot of C compilers. The first one that I remember being popular was Megamax C, a port from the Macintosh. Later it was upgraded and renamed to Laser C, which was the fastest compiler on the ST for a while, claiming it could compile and link the Sieve of Eratosthanes benchmark in just 5 seconds. Laser C was also mouse-based and fit in well with the ST UI.

Mark Williams also made a version of their C compiler for the Atari ST, which was also highly regarded. MWC was primarily command-line based, so was more popular with those coming from Unix.

Prospero C was another version for the ST, which was the first ST C compiler to adhere to the then-new ANSI standard for function prototypes. This was usually the one I preferred as I found it stable, reliable, easy to use. Although its compile speed was mediocre, its documentation was excellent, with wonderful GEM bindings.

Lattice C was also a popular compiler in the early 90s. It was a big package with lots of GEM documentation and good compile speed.

All of these C compilers were not cheap, usually about $150 to $300, which would be $400 to $800 today. And I had several. I think people often forget how expensive software development tools were in the 80s.

For those that couldn’t afford those prices, the ST also had many public domain C compilers. There were simpler ones such as Sozobon C and Heat & Serve C, but I remember by 1992 I was able to run gcc (Gnu C and C++) on my lowly Atari ST with its meager 4MB of RAM, which gave me great code compatibility with what I was writing on the Unix computers at school.

I also remember a couple early, low-cost C compilers. GST C and Haba Hippo C were both priced under $100. GST C was supposedly used to create a word processor (1st Word). Reviews at the time liked its GEM bindings, but it lacked floating point support and other things. Hippo C also did not have floating point, but worse it was copy protected. No one in their right mind would use a copy protected dev tool, so it disappeared quickly.

In its later years, the ST got Pure C which was created by Borland Germany and was very fast and similar to Turbo C.

File:High PureC 02.jpg — Image from the Atari wiki

Other Notes

The C, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of debugging forever.

- (Not) Jacques Cousteau

On the PC side, I often remembering seeing ads for Mix C in 80s Byte magazines. It was an inexpensive C compiler for the PC, which had a starting price of about $40. I didn’t have a PC then, but considering all the ST C compilers were at least $180 and up, I guess I was envious! Mix Software still makes this, renamed to Power C, and it looks like they still sell it for about $20!

Byte magazine devoted its August 1983 issue to the C Language.

I never used Microsoft C for anything, but I recall it was like $500 or so!

Borland had Turbo C, which tried to tag along with the Turbo Pascal brand. Turbo C was low-priced, but I don’t think it caught on much.

I was not involved in the Mac world back then, but I recall a product called Think C was highly regarded.

Computer Ads from the Past

THINK's Lightspeed C

I’m going to structure this post a little differently. Instead of dividing it into two sections, I’m going to look at this as one big story…

2 years ago · 4 likes · 2 comments

I know basically nothing about C compilers on the Amiga. I think Lattice C was available for it. Considering the Amiga OS had built-in multitasking, it sure seems like it would have made for a decent C development platform.

If you’ve used C on any of these other non-Atari platforms, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Legacy of C

We are tied to the code. And when we go back to the C, whether it is to debug or to rewrite - we are going back from whence we came.

- (Not) John F. Kennedy

C is still used today, which is just some absolutely amazing longevity. It still ranks as #3 on the Tiobe index! Of course, these days you’d more likely be using C++ rather than C, but even my son, who is in college now, used old-school C for a class project this past year.

As far as longevity goes, I’m sure older languages such as Fortran or Cobol are still being used in places, but they are not nearly as close to the mainstream as C is.

And even if you don’t use C directly, its influence is still felt to this day. In the early 2000s, Microsoft named its Java-like language C# to grab some of that C cred and that language is still very popular today. Objective-C, which Apple inherited from Next, was the primary Mac programming language until Swift took up the mantle.

The concise syntax of C has largely won over the more wordy syntax of languages such as Pascal and BASIC. Curly braces are everywhere!

I do find it somewhat funny that today C is considered a low-level language that you use when speed is paramount, whereas in the 80s C was a modern, high-level (and portable) structured programming language. Assembly language programmers would often scoff at C and its inefficient code generation!

Goto 10: Retro Computing & Gaming

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