Bill's original Basic was written in assembler on a Teletype machine, and saved to paper tape. I think I remember reading that the original version of BASIC for the Altair was distributed on paper tape. GW Basic and the later Professional BASIC for MSDOS were written in assembler, and maybe C.

I believe the original Windows versions 1 and 2 (ick) through 3.1 were written first in assembler and later in assembler and C. The first versions of Win NT and Win95 were probably written mostly in C++.

didnt windows 1/2/3 have some pascal in it?

NT based systems are nearly entireley assembley and C

What's wrong with being thirteen-thirty-seven?
The nice thing about Gentoo is that your applications are optimised for your system. Sometimes you need that extra speed you won't get from a downloading a binary compiled to use only the '386 instruction set.

i dont see the speed benefit of compiling optimised apps from source.I just use 386 or 686 binaries and it is fast enough

building an optimised kernel does make a diff though

Thank you for that information. My generation hoarded clock cycles like misers. I've just come back to coding after a long absence and I'm horrified at what looks like sheer carelesness and bloat. It looks like 3 megabytes is the new 16k.

*Cough* Vista *Cough*

how the hell can an OS justify being up to 18gb when installed!

That's exactly true. But it shouldn't be a surprise. Did you know that the new space suit that NASA is working on for the Mars mission has 20,000 parts and cost over $1,000,000.

That's what is known as progress. It's what keeps us all employed.

Say "Thank You".

Hoppy

I'm that way too -- I was agast at the bloated code that young programmers write professionally a few years ago. When I asked why not write more efficient code the response was "so what? its user interface and doesn't need to be optimized". Well, they paid dearly for that attitude about a year later when the whole program was so slow that the customer wouldn't accept it.

About Windows 1.0 and MS-DOS 1.0 -- I remember those too. DOS version 1.0 did not have any support for subdirectories and Windows 1.0 was all text based, no graphics or fonts other than the operating systems default font. It ran on top of DOS instead of integrated with it.

Actually, all versions of Windows before Win95 (not counting the versions of Windows NT) ran on top of MSDOS.

Even Win95 and Win98 (and probably even WinME) had remnants of MSDOS hidden away underneath. That's why they were far flakier and insecure than NT.

Vista got bloated because of the perceived need for more security (probably needed, but the cure is often an annoying message box asking the superuser if he really wanted to change that feature, for instance.) and user interface "BLING" (not needed).

I'm typing from a Vista machine now. The only blue screen encountered was during the initial bootup. Reinstalling took care of the problem that caused the blue screen, and it's been stable since.

If you get a Vista machine, you have a choice of how much "bling" you want in the interface. While Aero features seem stable, I got annoyed by the semi-transparent window feature, and turned that off after two weeks. FWIW I allow OS updates, and haven't had a problem with any of them.

Incidentally, I consider the Mac OS to be full of bling also, though my non-geek wife loves her Mac. Tastes vary.