Inspired by this question.I heard that some very very early versions of C compilers for personal computers (I guess it's around 1980) resided on two or three floppy disks and so in order to compile a program one had to first insert the disk with first pass, run the first pass, then change to the disk with second pass, run that, then do the same for the third pass. Each pass ran for dozens of minutes so the developer lost lots of time in case of even a typo.How realistic is that claim? What were actual figures and details?
Is it true that first versions of C compilers ran for dozens of minutes and required swapping floppy disks between stages?
history;compiler
Absolutely.  I had Microsoft C (version 1.0, I think) for a Zenith Z100 computer in the early 80s that was delivered on several 5.25 360K floppy disks.  The Z100 didn't have a hard disk so I had to frequently swap floppies as I switched between the editor, compiler, and linker.  Compile and link times of several minutes were not unusual.  It got to be so annoying I paid $500 for a 2MB (yes, megabyte) memory expansion board so I could load all of the files into a RAM disk.  That cut the time down to about 30 seconds.  Funny ... I actually enjoyed programming back in those days because it was fun.  Today it's work.