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Linux Runs on 1971 Intel 4004 After 5-Day Boot Time

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Linux Runs on 1971 Intel 4004 After 5-Day Boot Time

A well-known hacker, Dmitry Grinberg, has achieved the impossible by running a stripped-down version of Linux on a 4-bit Intel chip from the early 1970s. The kernel takes nearly five days to boot, but it’s a remarkable feat nonetheless.

Who is Dmitry Grinberg?

Grinberg is a reasonably well-known hacker in the community. He designed the firmware for this year’s DefCon 32 attendee badges that featured a Game Boy Advance emulator. He also managed to get Doom to run on the badge powered by Raspberry Pi’s new RP 2350.

The Impossible Task

Grinberg’s latest project was to get Linux to run on an Intel 4004 from 1971. The Intel 4004 was a 4-bit processor with only 2,600 transistors and 16 registers. It was designed to power the Busicom 141-PF, a calculator manufactured in Japan, and had no logic functions. It also had about four kilobytes of RAM.

To achieve this, Grinberg created a basic MIPS R3000 emulator on the 4004. He used several vintage components and hardware emulation and software sorcery to fashion a custom circuit board with a rudimentary display. The custom circuit board was designed with no vias and only right-angle traces for a retro aesthetic.

The Boot Process

Even when overclocked to 790 kHz, the machine took nine days to boot. After further tweaking, Grinberg got the boot time down to 4.76 days. He considerably sped up his video of the boot process to make it more watchable.

Grinberg’s achievement is a testament to his out-of-the-box thinking and software/hardware hacking skills. Running Linux on a 1971 Intel 4004 is truly an impossible task without thinking outside the box.

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