I'm taking a course on operating system concepts, and I've found it very interesting. Most of the examples that we've looked at have been in C. Can you actually write one in C? It would be too hard to write one in assembly... Are there any good tutorials for this, like how to make the first program that runs on the computer upon bootup and how to interface with the hardware, etc.?

Yes, you can write an entire OS in C/C++ with a few embedded blocks of Assembly. Google has tons of links regarding this.. for instance, here is one: http://www.planet-source-code.com/vb/scripts/ShowCode.asp?txtCodeId=4513&lngWId=3

sweet - that's awesome

I'm no expert on the subject, in fact I'll be taking an Operating Systems course next year, but from reading the class description it looks like we do actually use C/C++ to write an entire (if small an very non-functional) OS. We write the bootstrap loader and eventually give the user a prompt which will allow them to execute very simple commands. Looks very cool (and probably fairly difficult, but that's half the fun). I shall decalare it NickOS and give Microsoft a run for their money :)

The drawback is, MS has thousands of employees that contribute to their OS. Tens of Thousands of man hours invested in it. I too want to write my own OS, but for now I think I will settle for working on my own programming language. C++ and Assembly would be your best bet for your OS development.

Yes, you can write an entire operating system in C; C was originally developed for writing OS code (for a little-known OS named UNIX ^_^) If you want to write an OS, your best option would be to take a look at the Linix code (mostly C), and edit it where appropriate. btw, MS doesn't have thousands of programmers working on Windows, it's probably more around the vicinity of a few dozen, if that.. AKhalifman@hotmail.com

? id settle for around a hundred or so GIMPS