Hi, Leland.

>C was written by someone from Bell Laboratory. It was written specifically to create the UNIX OS or DOS. Later a guy by the name of Bill Gates used C to create MS DOS. The scope of creating an OS is large and once done, if successfully booted all you get is a little input prompt. Most people have no idea of the great amount work that goes into getting the little imput prompt. The OS kernel must be able to fit in memory, as it can not be split partly in memory and partly on disk. Once the kernel is in memory, it pretty much runs the show. I think C compiles into assembler.

The history is actually a bit different.

C was written by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Labs, basically to make easier to write Unix, what was indeed a project he needed to be able to port a game he had wrote from platform to platform without the need of rewriting everything from scratch (tell me if games are not important to technology). 8-)

C and Unix emerged almost at the same time, chicken&egg style.

MS DOS was not written in C at all, but in assembler, and it was not written by BillG neither. They bought it from another programmer and tweaked the code toghether with Paul Allen. What both wrote from scratch was their real first product, a Basic compiler. I actually saw the code (in an old-processor assembler, of course), and it was quite neat. But I think there was not much "important" code written by Gates after that. He basically concentrated in design, running the business, and... well, becoming a billionaire. 8-)

My 0.02,