On Saturday 28 August 2004 05:14 pm, Greg Meyer wrote: > But then how was the first UNIX system created?
On a PDP-11, likely using RSTS or RSX-11. It's really a 'bootstrapping' process (called so because you're lifting yourself by your bootstraps). From bare iron you write a loader that loads from something simple - old times it was paper tape. On the first paper tape you have a very simple control program, all it might do is execute other programs and manage devices a bit. Using that you write the machine language code to write an assembler, then use the assembler to write better programs (maybe a disk driver and a file system), then use the improved tools to write a better control program, then an operating system, etc. With outside hardware you can write a lot of the system on another computer and have the advantage of terminals, editors, compilers, linkers - file systems! Build things and put then to a floppy or hard disk, them boot it on the new system. Once in place start putting the tools and such together - for Linux it was nice because there was a whole bunch of GNU stuff that could run. The old term of bootstrapping lives - you 'boot' your system up when it powers up. First the BIOS runs, then it loads a better loader from the hard drive, then the loader load the operating system. (In the old days I had to use the front panel switches to load a simple paper tape loader, then load a loader from paper tape and then tell it to load things from the hard drive. Yup, men were *men* and computers were made of *iron* in those days.)
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