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Drew is smart and his timeline is short but I think it’s the wrong way to look at it if you just put him on a pedestal for it. Making a UNIX clone is a typical undergrad project at most universities. Extending that to something that is complete is something that requires perseverance, not special genius.

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I think it is a matter of how you are exposed to programming. I started with pascal at 9, and I wrote my first (VM-)bootable OS in junior high school (around the age of 14). Not as fancy as this of course, but it booted into an environment not unlike r4rs scheme - based on SIOD. A scheme error was handled but any C errors would immediately lead to a kernel panic.

I am not a programmer today, but I can still wrap most of my head around many low level concepts. I can't, however, write anything resembling a modern web page. Nor can I understand how any larger JS application works.

NachOS was developed at Berkeley and maintained at UW. Both are top-ranked CS programs. Undergraduates are expected to add features to the core OS e.g. virtual memory, not build it from scratch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Another_Completely_Heurist...

https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~tom/nachos/

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