reading legacy floppy disks

[Alex Beamish]

On 9/8/06, Mel Wilson <mwilson-4YeSL8/OYKRWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>
> Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 07, 2006 at 07:27:42AM -0400, James Knott wrote:
> >> When I took C at George Brown College in 1995, we could use 3.5"
> >> floppies.  However, in class we used Turbo C on Windows 3.1, while at
> >> home I used Borland C on OS/2, so I had to be careful about variable
> >> sizes.  For example an int was 16 bits in Borland C, but only 8 in
> >> Turbo.  On occasion, my code would work fine at home, but crap out in
> >> class because I'd overflowed a variable.
> >
> > Don't 8 bit integers violate the C standard?  I thought it required
> > integer to be at least 16 bits.
>
> This recollection is rather strange.  I'd been using Turbo C
> since 1986 or so, and remember only 16-bit ints.  My version ran
> on a PC clone with 8088, so 16-bits was a normal size.
> In 1995 Turbo C 2.0 was my preferred small language, for writing
> little one-off utilities and the like.  No hint of anything so
> non-standard.


I'd have to agree with Mel .. an int was 16 bits, but you could also specify
a short which would be 8 bits, and a long which was 32 bits. And I got Turbo
C in '87, astounded that for about $90 the C compiler came with a full blown
IDE with debugger, make facility and various other utilities as well.

Back then, talking about running Unix on a PC got you strange looks.

Alex



         Cheers,        Mel.
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-- 
Alex Beamish
Toronto, Ontario
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