The origin of things

A couple of questions

1) What language was Windows written in?

2) what language was the [language that Windows was coded in] written in?

3) What environment was Unix coded in?

4) What environment was Assembly coded in?

1) What language was Windows written in?
2) what language was the [language that Windows was coded in] written in?
3) What environment was Unix coded in?

The answer to all 3 is C

Now I know I have confused you

Your question: How can C be written in C?

In languages you can reach a point called the 'break-even point'.



I would hazard a guess that the first original compiler was developed in Assembly or some other low level language. Assembly is written with direct interaction with the hardware (CPU, RAM, I/O systems) and so is really the lowest level you can obtain in languages.

As to the last one I have got no clue

4) punchcards

Machine language, I would imagine. For example, for someone to have originally written an assembly compiler for your Pentium II, they would write it using the very difficult to understand (for humans) machine language for the Pentium II architecture.

It's interesting that even now, somewhere, someone is playing with actual bits and bytes (of course, probably using some very advanced modeling tools to help in the process ).

Excellent points, Ctb, although I would guess that most parts of Windows for the past few years have been written in C++ rather than just plain good ol' C.

Also of interest: Microsoft does not "eat its own dog food". There is no significant piece of software written by Microsoft in Visual Basic. At one point, they tried writing Microsoft Money in VB, and then quickly moved to C++ when they realized how unstable and buggy it was.

I suppose the closest you could come to Microsoft eating its own dog food is the microsoft.com website, which is written in (I suppose) ASP.NET.

I think someone should quote MS to redevelop the MS site in PHP

I can understand why MS doesn't use their own software, looking at it, I wouldn't either.

>> 4) What environment was Assembly coded in?
Real Programmers used the toggle switches on the front panel, to load an OS, assembler or any other program, into the system. You had to put GWBasic into the Altair (world's first micro computer) in very much the same way. Some of the early altair hackers supposedly had the entire interpreter code memorized .

See http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~igor...Programmers.txt for more Real Programmer fun. This article is a classic

Andreas said the stuff about Windoze - not me (btw... I haven't gotten a chance to read any more of Date's book since our little "What is a Relational System?" talk. I'm hoping to get to it shortly though since school will be wrapping up within the next two weeks [yay!]).

Actually, Micro$oft is using IIS 6 (at least on their front porch: www.microsoft.com) which means they must also be using Server 2003. Oddly, they'll use their own products (presumably because, unlike the rest of us schmucks - they built it so they know how to actually tune it and make it work) but they don't program in their own languages... highly bizarre.. (but totally understandable)

Oops... yes, I see I wasn't paying attention. You guys all look the same to me :P.

But, to your second point; Microsoft hasn't even had the best history using its own web products. Even now, there are claims that FreeBSD servers still exist in the Hotmail network.

And there's no way to really know whether they are actually using IIS 6.0, anyway. They could still be using IIS 4, but changing the server ID output. Or, they could use it for only a small part of their site, while using whatever other odd mix internally.

I am reminded of the major faux pas when Microsoft and Unisys put up www.wehavethewayout.com only to wind up with major egg on their faces when people found that the site was running Apache on a FreeBSD server. It took them at least 48 hours to get the site onto a Windows 2000 system.

And I suppose one could get creative and simply have a FreeBSD/Apache machine output the Windows/IIS server ID. Only the techiest of the tech would consider to run some sort of TCP/IP or HTTP response fingerprinting on the server to verify.

Speaking of which, check out walmart.com's Netcraft page, which for several months reported itself as running "Microsoft-IIS/1.3.26" on Solaris 8 .

Well msn.com, hotmail.com and the Australian ninemsn.com.au are still reporting IIS 5.0 and Win2K.

LOL @ Walmart, that is one confused server

IIS on BSD.. hmm. The way some networks are designed it might be a simple mix of these two. The www server may runs IIS but maybe there's a FreeBSD router (or anything else) along the way.

BTW, Hotmail ran for several months under FreeBSD. They tried a few attemps before they finaly got it with windows (the servers coudn't cope with the load).

Hotmail ran FreeBSD from the start. The first time (and I believe a few times after) they switched the service to run off of the microsoft servers, the whole system crapped out on them. Articles started popping up on the net about this and microsoft was denying they were using the servers. It wasn't until a leak in microsoft that the whole thing was officially uncovered - and they then admitted to using it for some of there mail handling servers.