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I had hit some 1970s-era DEC FORTRAN some years ago, whose use of a 'struct' keyword made it proprietary.

DEC was bought by Intel which meant that license fees were required to keep the tool alive.

However, some intrepid nerds contributed a patch to GCC and, suddenly, life went on without Intel. I want to say that this was around GCC 6.x or so.

Which is how to cut at least that portion of the costs for the balance of these classic tools.



> DEC was bought by Intel

No, it wasn't.

Compaq (an x86 shop which did little in the OS space) bought DEC. It kept making the non-x86 DEC hardware and software.

Then HP bought Compaq. HP had its own processor & OS families, and had persuaded Intel to work with it on the successor to HP's PA-RISC architecture: Itanium.

Part of that deal is that HP passed over some DEC IP it had acquired to Intel. Effectively this killed off a significant rival to Intel, and in theory, opened a path to market for Itanium.

So Intel got DEC's Alpha, the first 64-bit RISC and the fastest RISC on the market. It killed it. It also sold off its Arm division to Marvell.

The other big thing HP got was DEC's minicomputer OS, VMS. It killed it, as I wrote at the time: https://www.theregister.com/2013/06/10/openvms_death_notice/

But it changed its mind and spun it off instead.

https://www.theregister.com/2014/07/31/openvms_spared/


DEC was bought by Intel

Their compiler business was bought by Intel, DEC itself was bought by Compaq.


I had missed that nuance.




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