It’s more art piece than computer
WTF?
!A well-known hacker has done the impossible.
He got a stripped-down version of Linux to run on a 4-bit Intel chip from the early 1970s.
Sure, it takes nearly five days for the kernel to boot, but hey, mission accomplished.
Dmitry Grinberg is reasonably well-known in the hacking community.
Hedesignedthe firmware for this year’s uber-cool DefCon 32 attendee badges that featured a Game Boy Advance emulator.
He alsomanagedto get Doom to run on the badge powered by Raspberry Pi’s new RP 2350.
The hacking pro’s latestprojectwas the self-imposed challenge of getting Linux to run on an Intel 4004 from 1971.
It was Intel’s first commercial chip and predates Linux by two decades.
It is truly an impossible task without thinking outside the box.
It had no logic functions.
It also had about four kilobytes of RAM.
So, there is no way to run Linux on the 4004 in a very literal sense.
This is where Grinberg’s out-of-the-box thinking and software/hardware hacking came into play.
First, hecreateda very basic MIPS R3000 emulator on the 4004.
However, that didn’t stop Grinberg.
However, it won’t break any speed records.
Even when overclocked to a whopping 790 kHz, the machine took nine days to boot.
After further tweaking, Grinberg got the boot time down to 4.76 days.
