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. He designed the firmware for this year's uber-cool 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.
DefCon infamously banned Grinberg and physically tossed him, mid-talk, from the venue because of his association with the badge's hardware designer, Entropic Engineering, which DefCon organizers were beefing with. The hacking pro's latest project was 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. My latest project: booting full Linux on an intel 4004 from 1971 for fun, art, and no profit: https://t.co/t3gVrscNcb #4004in2024 The Intel 4004 was a 740 kHz 4-bit processor with only 2,600 transistors and 16 registers.
Intel specifically designed the 4004 to power the Busicom 141-PF, a calculator manufactured in Japan, so its list of operations was essentially adding and subtracting. 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. Thi.
