Do you want your PC to boot faster? Well, if you think your computer has a slow boot time, how about waiting for almost a week for the machine to boot? That's how long it takes for a Linux PC with a Windows operating system. ancient The Intel CPU will keep your fingers moving on the desktop.
Tom's Hardware highlighted this unusual experiment, carried out by a programmer, Dmitry Grinberg, who decided to use the Intel 4004 to boot Linux (Debian, to be precise).
You may know that this is not just any processor, but Intel's first chip, and in fact the world's first commercially produced microprocessor, which arrived in 1971. Yes, more than half a century ago, the Intel 4004 appeared in all its 4-bit glory (its successor was the Intel 8080, which later gave rise to the famous 8086 processor, which ushered in the x86 era).
So how exactly does Debian boot this silicon relic? Very, very, very, very slowly, that's the answer.
In fact, booting Linux took 4.76 days, and as Tom points out, even running a directory listing command took the old CPU about 16 hours – ouch!
The full Linux boot video is available on YouTube unedited, but even sped up to 120x, it can be watched in 1 hour and 40 minutes, just in case you suffer from insomnia and need some material before bed. If you want to watch the short 10-minute video, check it out below.
Analysis: All the gory details
This is certainly one of those projects that falls into the “fun but useless” category, something Grinberg fully admits. Frankly, it's a miracle that it can be done at all; remember that the Intel 4004 was a 4-bit processor originally developed as a calculator chip.
How exactly was this feat achieved? Well, Grinberg's lengthy blog post gives a full account, but if you dare to do so, be warned that he gets into all sorts of technical details.
The quick version is that the programmer used a development board as a system with an Intel 4004 processor, clock generator, RAM, a ROM controller (and an ATMEGA48 acting as ROM), and then needed to perform some emulation tricks and a number of Linux optimizations.
In short, hats off to Grinberg, the author of many other interesting projects featured on that blog, including the entrepreneurial feat of hacking the PokéWalker (the PokéWalker was one of the most accurate pedometers ever made, can you believe that?).
