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Well, I follow pcc development pretty closely and still use it for a few small projects.

To be sure there are some pretty significant advancements in compiler design that are important for someone who is working on a compiler in a professional or research capacity. But for me it was more of an exercise in understanding enough to hack a little bit on pcc, lcc and now llvm. I really only got as far as graph coloring for register allocators, and type inference for non-C ML-like language (a flawed approximation of HM type inference).

Some people are moving back to hand written compilers, at least hand written recursive descent parsers in place of compiler generators like yacc/bison. My own experiments formalized the grammar with PEG to generate and confirm test cases, then hand written recursive descent from the PEG (very easy to do).

I don't think I hand optimize C to suit some ancient assumptions of what a compiler can do. A modern C compiler can do a lot of amazing substitutions to turn a well organized set of small functions into a very fast monolithic block of machine code.

These days, pretty much the best thing when writing C is to avoid doing things that are undefined so the compiler can do optimization instead of falling back to some legacy behavior hacked into it.

As for the Portable C compiler, while it is now available under a BSD license, was it available that way in the 1980s? This link makes me wonder:

Please check http://pcc.ludd.ltu.se/pcc_history/, and eventually the wikipedia page. PCC development started in the 70's, and was the BSD bundled compiler until 1994 (when it was replaced with GCC).

So did RMS or did not had an available opensource C compiler?

In the case of the Pastel compiler, is it really available if you can't physically run it? Perhaps Linus could have used it.

As for the Portable C compiler, while it is now available under a BSD license, was it available that way in the 1980s? This link makes me wonder:

http://pcc.ludd.ltu.se/licenses/

as the earliest license is dated 1998.

Here in Sweden a lot of mining is done in Kiruna:
City(?):
http://www.strangeharvest.com/mt/archive/kiruna3.jpg
http://www.mynewsdesk.com/files/e1ec5f78a79c345d4a3fcf3c86177f0f/resources/ResourceWebImage/thumbnails/flygbild_kiruna_november_2007_large.jpg?1238409989

They are even moving the whole city afaik because they have mined so much underneath it or if it's that they want to mine underneath it so it has to be moved.

The ice hotel (Jukkasjärvi):
http://www.qedata.se/bilder/gallerier/ishotellet/ishotell-ingang-natt.jpg
http://www.qedata.se/bilder/gallerier/ishotellet/ishotell-rum-japan.jpg
http://www.qedata.se/bilder/gallerier/ishotellet/ishotell-ingang2-natt.jpg
http://www.qedata.se/bilder/gallerier/ishotellet/ishotell-ute-hjerta.jpg
http://www.kirunabuss.se/taxibestallning-ishotellet/282FCFC53F4D46B483E98F34D627F045
http://fjellfotografen.se/albums/uta/sverige/lappland/Miniatyr_Iskyrka%20och%20Ishotell,%20Jukkasj%E4rvi%20%A9%20uta-bg1044.jpg
http://cache.virtualtourist.com/1323606-A_reindeer_fur_covered_bed_in_the_Ice_Hotel-Kiruna.jpg

Aurora:
http://www.ltu.se/polopoly_fs/1.36982!terassen_kiruna_aurora.jpg
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/autopia/images/2008/04/24/kiruna.jpg

http://www.wintercities.kiruna.se/nytt/kiruna6.gif

Kiruna on a map: http://homepage.swissonline.ch/Christener/Kiruna/Bilder/Kiruna.jpg

Esrange space center is close by to.

Kiruna location: 675118N, 201331O
Alaska: 5440'N - 7150'N, 130W - 173E

I don't know how much the gulf stream (eventually quite a bit?) help but if people can mine there I assume they can mine in Alaska to, why shouldn't they be able to? Heck I live in Örebro at around the same latitude as Stockholm and the location of this city is 5916N 1513O, so even that is more north than the southern parts of Alaska.

Arctic circle:
World: http://www.athropolis.com/map2.htm
Alaska: http://www.studentsoftheworld.info/sites/country/img/15000_AlaskaMap.jpg

I had much the same set of problems and found decent universities in Tampere, Finland, Luleå, Sweden

Well, I'll have to chip in my 2 eurocents and plug my own alma mater in Finland, TKK. The last I looked, it too was part of ISEP (or at least it offers the ISEP program to students). All (or almost all) of our graduate courses are lectured in English and those that aren't can still be taken in English through special arrangements.

Not that Luleå is a bad choice at all. My sister is going to go there for an exchange in 2010.

In Finland and Sweden the tuition costs are only nominal (< $100/year).

I had much the same set of problems and found decent universities in Tampere, Finland, Luleå, Sweden, and Accra Ghana that all participated in the ISEP program. My school offered a couple of different programs, but this one was notable insofar as it didn't require you to pay hardly anything extra. Unlike programs that expect you to pay massive chunks of cash for their own overhead and then full rate for tuition abroad, this one (and others like it?) just have the student pay tuition and room and board at the local university. They then get the same stuff from the receiving university.

On a related note, I ended up in Luleå which had the strongest English language CS program I'd ever seen. They also had a rather sizable community of foreign exchange students and a well-developed Swedish language program.

On a slightly less related note, no matter where you go you should make sure to take some non-engineering/non-CS courses. Studying international organizations and management abroad, even if only briefly, looks far better on a resume and will give you far more than any single engineering course. Be sure to make time for it.

There are very strong English language masters programs available in engineering schools and universities in Sweden and Finland (also this one), and presumably the rest of Scandinavia as well.

You haven't lived till you've biked over a frozen lake or read a book in perfect daylight at 2AM. Some schools have industries right next to campus to tap the student labor force and nearly all the universities have ample jobs for masters students right there on campus. This is also the perfect choice to allow you to maximize your vacation opportunities - Cheap student rates and lengthy school breaks. A university is also the ideal environment in which to study the language, both in a formal setting and with the students that are much more used to dealing with foreigners on a daily basis than the rest of the population.

That said, there's plenty of sysadmin jobs abroad under the employ of the US government, if you're willing to give up on coding at work for a while. See usajobs.gov and careers.state.gov. Simplifies dealing with visas and such.

See the last sentence of that page : http://www.ludd.ltu.se/~ragge/pcc/

You mean the sentence that says "This product includes software developed or owned by Caldera International, Inc." (emphasis mine)?

If that's "Caldera before SCO", it says nothing about whether PCC was "developed by SCO". If that's "Caldera after SCO", the question is whether it's "developed by" or "owned by"; if it refers to PCC being part of the UNIX source code base, well, that's "developed by AT&T, owned by SCO", not "developed by SCO" (which PCC wasn't, although SCO might have done some work on their version of it, just as they presumably did work on other parts of the UNIX they originally licensed from, and ultimately bought from, AT&T/USL/Novell).

See the last sentence of that page : http://www.ludd.ltu.se/~ragge/pcc/

I can't believe he did not even mention the first networked games....
Going from lonely games to playing X-Pilot against half the univercity campus in 1992 was a revelation.
And at the same time the MUd revolution started. Hundreds of players online from all over the world.
Oks there were no fancy graphics back then (but who cares), they were the frontrunners of the modern WoW,Everquest etc. that are all the hype these days
AD&D met the Internet and the labor of geeks was awsome.
Bumped into http://midnight-sun.ludd.ltu.se:3328/Midnight Sun in 1994 and it was downhill for me from that moment onwards....

/Mikael