C Portability Lessons from Weird Machines

1 · Joe Nelson · Nov. 15, 2018, midnight
In this article we’ll go on a journey from 4-bit microcontrollers to room-sized mainframes and learn how porting C to each of them helped people separate the essence of the language from the environment of its birth. I’ve found technical manuals and videos for this article to help bring each computer to life. It’s amazing that, by carefully writing portable ANSI C code and sticking to standard library functions, you can create a program that will compile and work without modification on almost a...