At 05:56 AM 5/6/2005, Ethan Dicks wrote:
I remember them in the 1986-1990 timeframe with their
Amiga product.
They were competing with Lattice (later SAS) C. I personally went
with Lattice for several reasons, none of which I can recall right
now. I do remember that Manx did embedded assembly just different
enough from Lattice that it was not trivial to port from one to the
other. Makefiles were different, too.
Damn. Had a long historical anecdote composed, then Eudora crashed
opening a piece of spam and all was lost.
Yes, Manx Software's Axtec C was popular on the Amiga. Lattice C
had the jump because they were the first officially recommended
compiler. They were a bit less agile in the market, so Manx was
able to steal away developers. Both compiler's developers would show
up at the Amiga developer conferences, eager to show off their
latest features. I remember Jim Goodnow of Manx telling me how they
started with a PDP-11 cross-compiler to create their CP/M Z-80
(in October 1982) version. Was the Apple II 6502 version out before that?
And then they went into the 68000 market with Mac, Atari and Amiga
compilers, and they had a PC version of course, too.
Inside Amiga itself, they started out with Sun and Stride hosted
cross-compilers. The first developer kits included the Lattice PC
cross-compiler. I remember editing and compiling on a Compaq luggable,
then sending programs over the serial port to my Amiga 1000, which
was something like serial number 36. Compiling on early Amigas was
a real pain. It was many months before hard disks became available.
The RAM disk that could survive a crash and warm reboot was a big help, too.
I think Manx closed up in the early to mid 90s. Jim went on
to help with REBOL.
- John