[...]
but, yes, IBM and their sometimes strangely arcane systems.
You are in good company with Mr Navia, who seems to believe that anyone
not running an x86 with blazing-fast hardware is unworthy to use the C
language.
No, Mr. BGB started by worrying about the difficulties a C
implementation might face on (wait for it) "MS-DOS / Win 3.x".
yep.
a few issues that come to mind:
8.3 file-names;
16-bit address issues (if not using DPMI or Win32S);
FAT16 (which deals very poorly with large numbers of small files, I have
memory of these pains with larger drives);
....
luckily, I started getting into computers when MS-DOS and Win 3.x was
nearing the end of its life-span, and being subsumed by the then new
Windows 95 (I was in elementary school at the time).
IIRC, the last time I was using a primarily DOS computer, it was IIRC a
hacked-together mix of the Win95 version of MS-DOS and a MS-DOS 6.22
implementation (many of the tools which were missing from the Win95 DOS
were copied over from 6.22). IIRC, I think I was mostly using the Win95
version of DOS for sake of FAT32 or similar (but, I was using it solely
as DOS due to saving disk space and given nearly everything I was doing
was in DOS).
I think I still had Win 3.11 and Win32S on the thing though, which I
remember as being able to run many Win95 apps at the time (the computer
was itself a 486 cobbled together from spare parts, with some "creative"
modifications, and duct tape, to make up for the case, PSU, and MOBO,
not really fitting together due to mismatched mounts and screw-holes...).
this carried over until a short time after the release of Win98, when my
HDD died horribly (boot-sector died), and I essentially lost everything
I had on that computer. subsequently, I just used Linux for the next
several years (cause Win9x was generally too terrible to really be worth
bothering with), but ended up later migrating back to Windows (using
Win2K), a short while before WinXP came out, then I used XP mostly this
up until fairly recently, when Windows 7 was released, mostly because my
brief exposure to Vista was... not exactly enjoyable (lag, many programs
not working anymore, ...).
IIRC, I messed with NT4 as well, but remember not really liking it at
the time (I think I remember lots of DOS apps not really working, like
Doom and Quake and similar refusing to work).
IIRC, I started out programming mostly using QBasic, and got some older
copies of MASM and TurboC.
over time, I migrated from QBasic to TurboC, mostly as QBasic was slow
and very limiting, and I remember being able to have much bigger arrays
and similar in TC (using far pointers).
after a while, I then jumped over to DJGPP (but still used QBasic for
misc things "here ant there"), and was using this for a while until the
fateful HDD crash.
later on, when returning to Windows land, I was using Win2K and Cygwin,
and have used primarily C since then (though migrating to MinGW and
later MSVC), with occasional ventures into other languages, but not
really liking what I found there.
I messed with Java but found it terribly slow and awkward at the time
(this being before Java stopped really being dead-slow), and at one
point ended up half-way migrating into Scheme land. despite developing
primarily on Windows, I never really "got into" .NET though (due to
various reasons). other reasons generally prevented a large-scale
migration to C++ as well.
or, at least, this is a quick summary of the past several decades...
but, often, the past does not entirely go away, and maybe some people,
somewhere, are still using primarily MS-DOS?...
or such...
