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If C was used to program Unix, what was used to program in C? and so on and so on, ie. how did they create the very first program?

Backwards_Dave
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    [A magnetized needle and a steady hand](http://xkcd.com/378/). – cnicutar Apr 13 '12 at 08:24
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    Probably you should ask this in **http://programmers.stackexchange.com/** – huMpty duMpty Apr 13 '12 at 08:25
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    The first program was created when there were no computers at all. By Ada Lovelace. – littleadv Apr 13 '12 at 08:26
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    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languages – Colin Pickard Apr 13 '12 at 08:29
  • The first computer programs were not "written", they were "hardwired" ([ENIAC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC), [Z3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_%28computer%29) and others). The next step was storing the program in memory; then someone wrote a program that would translate a "programming language" (Assembly) into a program in memory. And from there on, programming languages evolved. At first, all languages are written in *another* language, but sooner or later many of them (the better ones...) become "self-hosted", i.e. the compiler / interpreter is written in the language itself. – DevSolar Aug 27 '12 at 11:46

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Very first c compiler was written in assembly language. Assembly language is written in binary language. And binary language is hardware language, it is directly executed by hardware.

I quote David Rabinowitz:

Please read about compiler bootstrapping and the history of compiler writing

The idea is to write a very simple compiler directly in machine code, use it to write a more sophisticated compiler, use the second one to build a third one and so on until you can have a full featured compiler.

See the complete thread here.

Community
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