Let's just be honest that even if there was a free compiler in 1985 or earlier, there's no way that e.g. someone like Linus Torvalds or an RMS etc would have written various groundbreaking pieces of software on Ada. It was just in an entirely different headspace.
I was around then, and culturally there just wasn't this (legitimate) concern with safety in the more "hacker" and Unix community generally. C won headspace at the time precisely because it was minimal and close to the metal while providing the minimum of abstraction people wanted. Which was on the whole fine because the blast radius for mistakes was lower and the machines were simpler.
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Let's just be honest that even if there was a free compiler in 1985 or earlier, there's no way that e.g. someone like Linus Torvalds or an RMS etc would have written various groundbreaking pieces of software on Ada. It was just in an entirely different headspace.
I was around then, and culturally there just wasn't this (legitimate) concern with safety in the more "hacker" and Unix community generally. C won headspace at the time precisely because it was minimal and close to the metal while providing the minimum of abstraction people wanted. Which was on the whole fine because the blast radius for mistakes was lower and the machines were simpler.