I agree wholeheartedly, having written a kernel myself first year in high school (and I don’t consider myself very intelligent). Mine was even more involved — it had user space, protected memory, multitasking, file systems, etc. So much fun! What it came down to was persistence and reading the manuals.

I don't know C but I am interested in learning.

What would be a good place to learn the steps of making an OS?

I just want a bird's eye view right now, just to understand the moving parts. This will also help me in the future as a manager.

Totally agree, it was all about persistence way more than actual coding. And if you know where to look it's way easier than it sounds.

Much of the willingness to attempt to write “scary” software when you are young is being ignorant of the complexity involved. That is probably why younger people are so disruptive in tech as well. Older you get the more reasons why not to do something appears.

I also learned C and C++ back in the late 80's during high school, as part of the domain area we get to chose on the last three years (10 - 12).

We also got introduction to UNIX via Xenix on our OS classes, got to do a Pascal syntax highlighter and a couple of other cool things.

Fully agree with you, the accomplishment here is great and anyone else wondering about if they should attempt something like this, just give it a go.

Don't worry about writing perfect code, rather make it work somehow, perfection will come later.

I think you can make a similar statement about coding in general. For me, I got into coding because it was fun and I worked on projects (games) when I was in high school because I wanted to create something. The code I wrote was terrible but I kept at it because I really wanted that end result (a game of my own creation). If someone had told me it was hard, I probably would have laughed because it was mostly about persistence.

I've did this myself back in 2000/01 — there were fewer resources on the web back in the day (and dial-up was harder), so it was about hunting down freely available papers, books, source code and similar (a student in Serbia can't really walk into a library and get their hands on some real literature).

I actually did have a round-robin scheduler with prioritised processes and first-fit memory allocator in there as well.

During the presentation, as I pulled out a 3.5" floppy disk to boot up my OS, the teachers looked at me in disbelief: you've actually got something working?

If you are curious and willing to spend some quality time with your computer, this is a great way to learn about computers. Today though, I'd recommend people do it with ARM just for the kicks.

showoff

Don't get me wrong, but no high-school teaches operating system development.

I did go to a kind-of-special school (Mathematical Grammar School in Belgrade) that did have advanced (for high-schools) IT subjects like assembly language development, database courses and similar, but as I said, even my teachers were surprised I actually had something to show off after presenting my work on an OS.