We Live in the Rarest Type of Planetary System

[Glitch]

I would argue against that, as probably the most common language in use through most of the 1980s was by Microsoft.

My experience on the IBM PC platform during the 1980s was with Lifeboat Associates' Lattice C, Borland's Pascal 3.0, and Nantucket's Clipper. Among other one-off languages and platforms. I avoided Microsoft like the plague, as did most experienced developers during the 1980s. It was only after Microsoft released its version of C++ in 1993 that people began using Microsoft. No business used stack-based BASIC. You couldn't do anything with that piece of junk. Altair BASIC may have put Microsoft on the map, but as a company they sucked for the next two decades. They only started being taken seriously by developers since the 1990s.

Most people likely do not realize that the programming language and operating system built into almost every computer from the Altair and Apple II to every Commodore machine, Atari, IBM, TRS-80, Texas Instruments, and almost every home and microcomputer at the time was just a licensed and slightly modified version of Microsoft Basic. I admit that many of their higher languages sucked, but their MS Basic was solid and how tens of millions were first exposed to programming as well as actually doing our IO functions.

Actually, at the time everyone realized that fact. Which is why nobody developed anything in BASIC other than extremely simple games or educational programs. It was a limited stack-based language that could not be compiled.

And it was good for the industry as the vast majority of code so long as it did not use PEEK or POKE commands was almost seamlessly transferable from one platform to another. And tens of millions of computers were built that came with Microsoft Basic as their built in language and OS.

It didn't matter if it is was transferable, since nobody used BASIC.

And their newer C libraries are used by a huge number of programs today and have matured a lot. As it makes cross-platform programming easier and can be updated simply by even a complete novice. About every other time I install a game they check to see if my MS C library is current. Whatever else can be said for MS, the finally brought an end to a lot of the chaos of the late 1980s and early 1990s by setting industry standards. I still remember the era when I might have 3 or 4 different GUIs on my computer, each one largely used by a single program that I had to use. Like having GEM just so I could use Ventura Publisher and nothing else. Or Visi On for VisiCalc, NeWS for FrameMaker, OS/2, and I even used GEOS 86 as I had been a serious GEOS user when I had my C64.

By the middle of the 1990s, the only OS I had to use was some version of Windows, and the classic Mac OS. Oh, and Novell and XENIX as some places were still using that as their NOS until the start of the 2000s. I still laugh at how worthless my CNE in NetWare 3 is, and I have not used it in well over 2 decades.

The industry finally settling on Windows sure made my job a hell of a lot easier as I no longer had to support so damned many operating systems.

Microsoft C sucked during the 1980s, as did their libraries. Which is why no developer used them. There were too many other more competent language developers to waste any time with Microsoft. Microsoft didn't get their shit together until the 1990s. They also were certainly not establishing any industry standards. Everything Microsoft has they bought from someone else. Microsoft does not develop anything, they buy it from other developers. They did that with DOS, Windows, FoxPro, MS-SQL, and everything else they own. You are overly infatuated with Microsoft, giving them far more credit than they deserve.