6 May
2005
6 May
'05
8:25 p.m.
On 5/6/05, John Foust <jfoust at threedee.com> wrote:
Compiling on early Amigas was a real pain.
Any floppy-based C compiler is a pain. It's worse on early Amigas
because malloc() would guru the OS rather than return a null pointer
(not the C compiler's fault - the lowest level memory allocation
routine in the kernel did it). It gave rise to a lot of old software
that would *never* fly in the UNIX world because AmigaDOS 1.0 and 1.1
developers assumed that if malloc() returned, the pointer *must* be
valid. Not a safe assumption on a machine that doesn't have virtual
memory (and not that safe when you _do_ have virtual memory, either).
-ethan