classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu Subj: Re: Development, round II Max Eskin wrote: According to Goldstine in "The Computer: from Pascal to von Neumann" the first working modern stored program was a sorting routine that John von Neumann wrote in roughly 1943 - and had working on the ENIAC/EDVAC by 1946/47, but it was in machine code (binary). An Assembler was available on the Princeton U/Institute for Advanced Study EDSAC by the Fall of 1949. Herman Goldstine and John von Neumann wrote a programming manual for it by 1951. Short-code (which would by today's standards be classified as a type of assembler) was available for UNIVAC machines by October 1952 thanks to Logan, Schmit, and Tonik. Heinz Rutishauser of the ETH in Zurich described the world's first compiler in a preprint issued by ETH in 1952 (based in part on work that Konrad Zuse had published in 1948/49). Grace Hopper (who had started out working with H. Aiken at Harvard) developed A0 then A1 and published results in the ACM Proceedings by 1952. By 1955 she released A2 - which was popular on UNIVAC computers. She went on the become instrumental in the development of COBOL. FLOW-MATIC and MATH-MATIC were also available on Sperry computers in the early(?) fifties. Remington Rand then developed a language called UNICODE by 1957/58 for use on UNIVAC 1103A and 1105 machines. John Backus (et al.) at IBM developed: 1] Speedcoding in 1953 for the 701 2] FORTRAN starting in 1954 (which took 18 person years to develop, and was released as Fortran I in 1956/57) 3] served on the international committee that developed Algol (starting in 1959 but continuing through the 60s). A DOS kernel is distinct from a DOS installation. The DOS kernel is tiny even for fairly recent versions. On a Dell boot disk for MS-DOS (I think 6.22 and thus not classic) I see the following file sizes: IO.SYS 40,774 MSDOS.SYS 38,138 COMMAND.COM 54,645 and on a bootable PC-DOS 7.0 (again not classic) partition I have: IBMIO.COM 40,614 IBMDOS.COM 37,066 COMMAND.COM 52,956 and in either case the configuartion files AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS are each less than 1 kB. The big user interface difference between these and CP/M is the full hierarchical file system. Of course they also come with loads of bloatware - but some of that is quite fun. e.g. PC-DOS can be optionally installed with Rexx and I chose that option. I also have a couple of different DPMI's available including the one for DJGPP. Peter Prymmer