• bandwidthcrisis@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Not everyone knew C.

    Lack of trust: what was it doing behind the scenes? What’s if it just went and … allocated memory all by itself!!

    Optimization wasn’t so good back then. People believed that they could write better assembly. For speed and size.

    Memory was tight. C would include big libraries even if only one function was needed. If “hello world” was several k in size, that added to the suspicion (even though that was a fixed overhead in practice).

    • MonkderDritte@feddit.de
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      6 months ago

      People believed that they could write better assembly. For speed and size.

      Now we know we can’t write better C.

      Though my teacher in tech school a few years ago ran an entire OS, where everything is written in assembler. What was it?

      • Macros@feddit.de
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        6 months ago

        Maybe Kolibri OS?

        Its an amazing project, booting from a single floppy disk into a full graphical OS with multiple tools. And that on PCs with almost no RAM.

        I sometimes use it to backup ancient PCs.