I accidentally googled into this short page on History of PC based C-compilers which made me think about my first C compiler: Aztec C on Apple II.  I was among the first wave of programmers who cut their teeth on PCs instead of minicomputers and state-of-the-art in PC software has risen high enough to make programming in assembly tedious.

So I just bought a copy of wonderfully thin K&R book which took only an hour to read and started writing in C.  I really liked it but I wasn't comfortable with the idea of using it for production code yet because size and speed still reign supreme then.  But it was fine for writing tools.

I think the first program I wrote with Aztec C was a double-hires image editor because that was when Apple IIc was about to be released and there were no tools to edit double-hires images.  It was sweet not having to worry about registers and being able to write almost English like code (well, it does when compared to assembly code).

Oh boy, time sure flies.