Is it possible for one person to build an entire operating system from scratch with no help?

[Naureg]

http://www.templeos.org/

Previously called Sparrow OS, this was written entirely by some religious nut.

"I wrote all 142,985 lines of TempleOS over the last 9.7 years, full-time."
"TempleOS does not use any libraries,
modules or code from other sources -- I wrote it all from scratch"

He wrote a C compiler for it aswell and, interestingly, everything runs in ring 0.

[Script Coder]

It is perfectly possible to do that, but it is still no where near a commercial OS. That said, it is still awesome :P

[3qX21hU5]

10 years also gezzzz

[Oria]

Well here is your answer; 10 years to make an OS that looks like it was from the 80s.

[moorecm]

That's pretty cool. However, the source for Windows 8, or even Ubuntu, is not even remotely close to 142k LOC.

For example:
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_lines_of_code_are_in_the_Ubuntu_operating_system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_lines_of_code#Example

[3qX21hU5]

8, 500 man years of effort gez and over a billion dollars. So I would if say if you can live for around 10k years give or take you could make a modern os by yourself ; p

[chrisname]

I've heard of that; it used to be called LoseThos. The guy who wrote it is schizophrenic and occasionally replaces his entire website and fills his twitter with delusional rants.

The "C compiler" is actually a compiler for a language he invented called C+. I assume it's some kind of cross between C and C++. I feel bad for him, he's been ostracised from every OS development community he's tried to join (or at least, all the ones I'm aware of). His OS looks horrible, but you have to respect the amount of effort and ingenuity he poured into writing it.

http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html