Question thats been buggin me

[omni]

Ok, I know that games are made from languages like C++ and Turing, but what programming language are operating systems made from???
I mean for the FIRST computers, how did Microsoft start making an operating system from scratch, without any compilers or something (I'm talking about way in the past)???

[Dan]

They type it in mashen code (bianary). Whould have been a real pain in the ass, typeing tones and tones of 0s and 1s. But affter thay they made better and better langs witch where more and more higher up.

I bivle tho most OS now are made mostly in C and some parts in asmebley and then they add higher up langs like C++, java and VB (for windows only) for the apps and such.

Well at least i thinks thats how it works, i am shure some one will have more info to add to this or somting to point out that i side horbly wrong.

[Andy]

they first made dos using binary, then everything else was built on dos... until NT came out

[Dan]

dodge_tomahawk wrote:

they first made dos using binary, then everything else was built on dos... until NT came out

On the windows side of things that is....

[wtd]

Basically it's an extended system of bootstrapping.

You build the first assembler in machine code, then you build a better assembler in assembly, then you use that assembler to build an even better assembler, eventually leading to things like Pascal and C compilers, which you use to build better C and Pascal compilers....

[omni]

wow thats just crazy. I know from experience assembly languages are hard. BUt machine code? I commemorate those programmers in the past for spending all their time making an OS.

[shorthair]

dont give bill or paul allen any credit all they did was pay a guy 50,000 for his OS and then told ibm it was their invention called DOS ,

steve jobs was just as bad stealing the omuse from Xerox oh and Microsoft stealing hte GUI from apple , and well the story just gets worse

[Dan]

And now apple just gave up and used unix, lol. But i have a fealing that windows is secutly working on some way to make there OS use linux/unix w/o any one knowing.

[wtd]

shorthair wrote:

steve jobs was just as bad stealing the omuse from Xerox oh and Microsoft stealing hte GUI from apple , and well the story just gets worse

The mouse predates the GUI issue, though Xerox was the first to incorporate it into a GUI in the now accepted way.

Apple was invited openly to see Xerox's work. The progress Xerox PARC had made had no commercial viability at all. The machine it ran on was the size of a desk, and it was very very slow. Apple openly paid Xerox for this opportunity and hired a good deal of the Xerox PARC staff who'd been working on the GUI. They then made it marketable by simplifying it in practice (the foundations for the Xerox PARC machine were much simpler and far more elegant in theory), and making it available on a small machine, that, for it's day, was quite affordable compard to the competition, and given what it offered.

Microsoft was a much smaller company at the time, an underdog when compared to the mighty Apple. They were also one of the primary software contributors to the Macintosh platform. The ouster of Steve Jobs from Apple left John Sculley in charge. Ironically Jobs had recruited Sculley himself when Sculley was running Pepsi because Steve didn't want to be bothered by the day-to-day business details.

Sculley fell for much the same intimidation tactics Bill Gates had used on IBM execs, and signed a contract which gave Microsoft far-ranging rights to the Macintosh GUI, under the excuse that Microsoft needed such rights in order to create software (notably Word) which better integrated with other Mac software.

At the same time, Steve Jobs was not idle. Leaving Apple he invested much of the money he'd made on his Apple stock in a small company called Pixar. Also, driven by the thought that the things that went wrong at Apple could have been avoided, he gathered some former Apple staff who had also left around the time John Sculley took over, as well as numerous other bright minds in the computing field and formed NeXT computing, which solved the big Apple blunder by being more shrewd business-wise, but also by embracing its developer community and reaching out to new developers, so that no company, be it Microsoft or others, could ever claim they needed rights to the interface in order to write a program that looked like it belonged in the NeXTStep wold.

Comparing the work of these three companies shows that Microsoft was much more active in stealing from NeXT than they were in stealiong from Apple in the following years.

Basically: Apple was offered the GUI and paid for it anyway. Microsoft was offered the GUI for free, essentially, since they could have done all the same things NeXT or Apple did on their own, but they stole it anyway.

[Cervantes]

Pirates of silicon valley, anyone?
wtd, your in-depth posts rock.

[shorthair]

i got all my info from pirates of silicon valley and a history book , its been 3 years since i read up on it , i apologize for hte loose information

[Genesis]

If you liked Pirates of Silicon Valley, then Hackers is a good book to read too.