As I experienced that era, C wasn't really a practical language choice on 8-bit systems. Ok yes you could get a C compiler but it would typically need overlays hence be very slow. Assembler was pretty much where it was at on that generation of systems, or special-purpose languages such as BASIC and PL/M.
C worked ok on a pdp-11/45, but that had 256K of memory and 10s of MB of fixed disk. That level of hardware didn't appear for micro systems until the 68k generation, or I suppose IBM PC, but I don't remember the PC being too important in C coding circles until the 386, much later.
Yeah, that was indeed the case, while I did some C and C++ even on MS-DOS, it was Assembly, Turbo BASIC, Turbo Pascal and Clipper where I spent most of my time.
Even during my early days coding for Windows 3.x, I was doing Turbo Pascal for Windows, before eventually changing into Turbo C++ for Windows, as writing binding units for Win16 APIs, beyond what Borland provided, was getting tiresome, and both had OWL anyway.
C worked ok on a pdp-11/45, but that had 256K of memory and 10s of MB of fixed disk. That level of hardware didn't appear for micro systems until the 68k generation, or I suppose IBM PC, but I don't remember the PC being too important in C coding circles until the 386, much later.