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Doing this today is actually way, way easier than it would have been back then. Today we have a wealth of information and much better tooling (QEMU alone makes the process of writing an OS so much easier). Writing a simple OS and compiler are both common school projects, so many programmers today have done it.

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It's easier in some ways but harder in a lot of others. For starters the definition of an "OS" has greatly expanded over time. In the CP/M and even DOS days it was a very primitive shell and some disk I/O routines. Secondly low level knowledge was a lot more common because you needed it to get anything done. You could do some interesting things in BASIC but "real" programs were written in assembly.

Compare cooking dinner while backpacking vs cooking dinner at home: both produce warm food, but we probably neither take an induction stove (or microwave!) backpacking, nor build campfires in a kitchen.

Agreed, I had a similar takeaway.

>...faded lineprinter paper show that the bulk of the work on OMU dates from March/April/May 1984... by mid 1984 I had a perfectly usable O/S

It's impressive that Hosgood made what he did when he did. It's equally impressive for an entirely different set of reasons that modern CS students can burn through that in a semester. Or you could look it up on WikiHow.

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