An archetypal dumb embedded-systems application, like
toaster (which superseded it). During one period
(1983--84) in the deliberations of ANSI X3J11 (the C standardization
committee) this was the canonical example of a really stupid,
memory-limited computation environment. You can't require
printf3
to be part of the default runtime library — what if you're targeting
an elevator controller?
Elevator controllers became important
rhetorical weapons on both sides of several
holy wars.