The Power C Compiler

The first C compiler I used! I found a bug where if you allocated arrays larger than 64K (using far pointers of course) accesses would wrap around at 64K. I guess they didn&#x27;t implement far pointers correctly. Anyway I sent them a bug report with a reproducer as a typed letter -- from the UK to the US -- including an international reply coupon[1], and they were kind enough to send me an update to the newer version on a 5.25&quot; floppy. It fixed the problem.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;International_reply_coupon" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;International_reply_coupon</a>

This is like opening a time capsule and examining all the little details. Almost more interesting than the barebones, locked-in-time product page for a paid C compiler, is the locked-in-time cgi-bin-powered shopping cart page at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.safepay.net&#x2F;cgi-bin&#x2F;shop&#x2F;cart.cgi?db=products.dat&amp;merchant=mixsoftware" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.safepay.net&#x2F;cgi-bin&#x2F;shop&#x2F;cart.cgi?db=products.dat...</a> (note it&#x27;s an http link).<p>There&#x27;s a whole host of old-school relics here--it is truly a blast from the past: paying separately for a debugger, paying for specific libraries, videos available on DVD.<p>It&#x27;s really hard to express how deeply internet access has changed the landscape of ... well, everything, but in this particular case, the programming ecosystem. gcc probably existed back when I bought this compiler, and probably so did Borland&#x27;s excellent pre-internet-era IDE, but I didn&#x27;t know that. And so I bought this one.

I just ran across my 3.5&quot; disks for this along with some of the support tools! Finding this book in the mall bookstore and seeing the ad in the back was a revelation for me. Best $20 I ever spent.<p>I wanted to learn how to make .exe files but at the time had no resources or contacts on how to even start. This book and compiler was what launched my entire career.<p>It allowed you to do inline assembly as well which was a lot of fun on an old DOS machine. I&#x27;m pretty sure my brother and I hit every possible way to lock up the computer or have it spontaneously reboot since we didn&#x27;t really understand memory management. Lots of fun trying to make video games and putting the vga card into Mode13 or ModeX as well. Good times.

The goodness was actually the book. The writing was simple and clear, the examples were self-contained and practical. It was a perfect textbook. Many years ago I gave my tattered copy to a second-cousin when he was about 15 and it totally changed his life; he became a coder and never looked back.

I remember learning C from this when I was a teen. The advice at the time was buy the package, throw away the compiler and use Turbo C, and then learn from the Power C book which was the best resource available.

&gt; binary coded decimal floating point routines and financial functions for calculating the time value of money, depreciation, etc<p>Wow what was the utility of BCD for these applications? My only experience with BCD is with RTCs. I always assumed that the RTCs had been designed for driving a simple display like 7-segment lcd. But doing floating point in BCD? I guess the 8087 wasn&#x27;t common yet but maybe soft float using twos complement wasn&#x27;t common either?

I used to teach C Programming using the Power C compiler at a local community college. It was a nice enough compiler that the students then owned so that they could continue to experiment and learn.<p>I found a couple of things to not ring true in what I&#x27;d read about the compiler, though. There were issues around a lack of error messages when students would send incorrect parameters to a function. If I remember correctly, I think that one could transpose the arguments in a call to fprintf() so that the FILE * reference was not the first parameter. A few of my students put a format string at the front, a few parameters, and then the FILE *. I believe that the version of Power C that we were using did not flag this as invalid. I question the ANSI compliance claim because of this and a couple other odd issues.<p>The other thing that didn&#x27;t really ring true was the often-quoted line about loving the book and throwing away the compiler. Really, the book wasn&#x27;t that great, in my opinion.<p>I do believe that one received more than their $20 worth of value from the offering, though. It was a nice enough compiler with a decent book.

What a blast from the past!<p>I loved Power C. The paper manual was quite amazing - imagine all the man pages, but informative with examples and superbly written. I kept using that manual for years until it quite literally fell apart, purely because it was so good.

This was the compiler I learned to code on - $20 was great for a student budget. If you click through the pages you can also find their database toolchest which is a great introduction to btrees and managing storage.

I bought and used their Database Toolkit back in the day. Far more than adequate for the job at hand. I&#x27;ve looked, and it&#x27;s actually hard to find just a simple B+Tree library out on the internets today.

I cringe when I look at this. Everything was sooooo primitive back then! We&#x27;ve become spoiled with programming languages like Rust, C# and Python, almost all of which are free to use.<p>Except for the fact that I was 30 odd years younger and had a beautiful girlfriend, I don&#x27;t long back for those times.

I may very well have used this in college some 30 years ago on a 286 DOS machine.<p>IIRC I managed to blow the stack with a recursive function 6 calls deep. Shortly after, I got a 486 and installed Linux (gcc worked much better)

&gt; The manuals (if any) that accompany our competitor&#x27;s products are terse at best.<p>So they didn&#x27;t compete with Borland?

Never heard of it.<p>Back in the late 80&#x27;s Portugal it was either Borland or Microsoft for MS-DOS, eventually we also became aware of Watcom, Metaware and Symantec.

That looks like the Go logo. Did the Go creators reuse one of the C logos? (Yes yes, Unix lineage)

I think I used Microsoft, Borland and Wacom compilers under DOS&#x2F;Windows 3.x.

I&#x27;d love to see the VHS tapes with lessons that teach you C