ChaOS is a result of frustration with the Microsoft thread of operating system design, a frustration which built during the period 1985 to 1995, when PC hardware and software development was frenetic. During that time, I first wrote accounting and order processing software for my small textile business, based in the North of England. Then some software for creating and editing repeating patterns for continuous textile prints. By 1990, I was shoving our dyestuffs through reluctant piezo-electric inkjet printers to create textile transfers, mimicking our bulk continuous transfer prints. At the time Sharp Electronics(UK) took some interest, and a brief appearance of the Lotti Design System on the BBC Tomorrow's World programme (Christmas 1990) rounded off that year. Sharp Electronics asked me to write a Windows driver for their JX-100 handy scanner. This was completed (SharpScan100) by March 1991, but I found Windows programming to be expensive - several hundred pounds at the time for the development kits needed.

Keeping a custom software package working through those years was a nightmare, through 8086,80286 80386, to 80486 and Pentium, upgrade your PC and every time my software needed a rewrite. Things began to stabilise around 1995, with 80486 processors now including a maths chip, but by this time I was thoroughly cheesed off with the DOS/Windows rat-race.

By 1995 I had bought a factory for the textile business, and had two more software projects in mind. First, a radio-frequency remote control system for our main Cobden Chadwick print machine, and a CO2 laser CNC to cut rollers for the print machine. My Windows experience had taught me that this was an unsuitable operating system for real-time interaction with the outside world. In a bookshop I found Richard Burgess' book 'Developing Your Own 32-bit Operating System', and thought I might be able to modify the system described in the book (MMURTL) to run the print machine.

I soon had MMURTL running, and was astonished by the speed at which things could happen on a computer in native 32-bit linear mode. But programming MMURTL was not easy, as it required a deep understanding of PC hardware, something which I lacked (having been protected from the hardware by BIOS, DOS and Windows programmers' interfaces). Furthermore, the compilers supplied to build MMURTL were creaky. But Richard Burgess did include the source code to the compilers in his distribution disk. I recompiled these using my now favourite Watcom 'C++' v10.0 into 32-bit DOS4GW programs, decided I could do better, and wrote a one-pass 'C' compiler with inline assembler and floating point support. I started inventing my own flat 32-bit executable format to play around with on a DOS4GW loader program which I called DBG.

With a bootstrap loader drawn from studying the MMURTL loader, I created my first, home-grown bootable floppy disk. ChaOS was born.

By 1997, ChaOS was running the RF remote control system on the Cobden Chadwick print machine, and has now booted up each workday morning from the same hard disk for eight years.

Since then I have built my laser CNC, then learnt to fly aeroplanes, which caused me to forget about ChaOS for while. I have been a bit slow to embrace the internet, discovering Linux only recently - had I explored Linux sooner maybe ChaOS would never have been written.

But is has been fun to write GPS software recently for ChaOS running on a Fujitstu Stylistic 1000 and Fortuna U2 GPS.