I have two visions of this.

One, it reminds me of that "worlds longest song" or somesuch thing, where they play a note every 10 years.

The other is just a picture of someone, asleep at their desk, a pile of calendars with days checked off tossed to the side, random unwashed mugs and such all dimly lit by a desk lamp and see the `$ make linux` finally return to an new, unassuming `$` prompt. Like Neo in the Matrix.

I wonder of you can calculate when it will finish by counting the instructions and then pin the date it will finish and stream the completion.

I’d assume you’d have at least a few bit flips occur in the process.

Fixed the typo. Thanks

While it boots, you can look at LEDs and map them to kernel function easily by running “nm” on vmlinux.

Also, when in user space, you can tell between the main binary (way below 0x01000000) and shared libraries (loaded high near 0x77000000)

Sorry for the nitpick, but the laptop in the video looks like Windows 2000

Windows 2000

For the video, i wanted a laptop with a real serial port (no usb). This one fit the bill and was $20 on eBay. Windows 2000 is the prettiest windows IMHO, so that’s what I installed for the demo video.

Probably closest would be the Ig: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_Prize

Probably nothing unless you want to emulate it on severely underpowered hardware.

Very impressive work, but most of the work has been necessary because Intel 4004 was not really the first microprocessor, this was just BS propaganda used by Intel to push back by one year the date of the launch of the first microprocessor, to 1971.

The first true (civilian) microprocessor was Intel 8008, in 1972.

Intel 8008 was a monolithic implementation, i.e. in a single PMOS integrated circuit, of the processor of Datapoint 2200, therefore it deserves the name "microprocessor".

The processor of Datapoint 2200 had an ugly architecture, but there is no doubt that it was a general-purpose CPU and traces of its ISA remain present in the latest Intel and AMD CPUs.

On the other hand, the set of chips that included Intel 4004 was not intended for the implementation of a general-purpose computer, but it was intended just for the implementation of a classic desktop calculator, not even a programmable desktop calculator.

This is the reason for the many quirks of Intel 4004, e.g. the lack of instructions for the logic operations, and many others that have increased the amount of work required for implementing a MIPS emulator suitable for running Linux.

Even if Intel 4004 was intended for a restricted application, after Intel has offered to sell it to anyone, there have been many who have succeeded to use it in various creative ways for implementing microcontrollers for the automation of diverse industrial processes, saving some money or some space over a TTL implementation.

In the early days of the electronics industry it was very normal to find ways to use integrated circuits for purposes very different from those for which the circuits had been designed. Such applications do not make Intel 4004 a true microcontroller or microprocessor. Very soon many other companies, and later also Intel, have begun to produce true microcontrollers, designed for this purpose, either 4-bit or 8-bit MCUs, then Intel 4004 has no longer been used for new designs.

I didn't know the guy but he clearly knows what he's doing, it's unbelievably entertaining to read the details of achieving an impossible task with the most underpowered tool possible.

I mean, it's fun and interesting bullshit that cheats a lot. I'm sure that you could emulate a MIPS using a one-bit processor like the MC14500[0] with enough supporting hardware, real or virtual. Looking forward to it, Dimitry.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_MC14500B

Windows ran on a similar MIPS machine (Microsoft jazz). The issue is emulating scsi. I think I’d need a lot more rom space to do that. Scam is messy and hard.

The alternative is to find the Windows MIPS DDK and build a paravirtualized disk driver for it like I did for Linux. That would make it more doable.