[tetrarchy]

Wow, tough crowd here. When I was in high school, the extent of my computer knowledge was a little visual basic. After watching all of his videos, I'm extremely impressed - it looks like he designed (or at least integrated) a lot of the hardware, operating systems, and applications himself. After a BS and now almost a MS in computer engineering I think I could (...eventually) pull something like this off, but this guy clearly spent a lot of time and effort on learning the ins and outs of computer architecture on his own, in high school no less.

To those complaining that this could be done on a fpga in verilog or something, I think that might be kind of missing the point. There is just something about building the logic up from the ground that is very satisfying. Hooking up the physical wires makes it all that much more real. A huge time investment, but i got the feeling the kid spent a good deal of his free time on it.

So again, mad props. Hope it gets him into a sweet school.

[ralfd]

Don't forget that most people here are insanely brilliant and either work for Apple or Google and contributing to an Open Source project which implements VMWare In Node.js while planning their startup.

So the stuff this teenager hacked together is just a steady soldering hand and a lazy saturday afternoon.

[slunk]

"Wow, tough crowd here."

Yeah, no kidding. I just graduated from a computer engineering program and I still find this impressive, especially for a high school student. What could I do with a computer right out of high school? Code some java or c++ (poorly) and install linux on it? That's about it.

[conradev]

Not speaking against this kid in particular, what he did was cool, but there are plenty of high school kids who can write professional quality code (in a multitude of languages) and know a lot about the internals of a computer. Speaking from experience, its annoying when age becomes a matter of importance.

[slunk]

It might just be the high school I attended but I can only think of one kid out of about 3000 in the entire school who was intimidatingly competent with computers. I can see where you're coming from. Making too big of a deal out of his age might be annoying to some people but with age comes experience and all the anecdotal evidence at my disposal says that most high schoolers don't have this experience yet. :/

[slunk]

To be clear, the reason why I find this impressive is because I would assume it implies a significant amount of studying in his free time since computer architecture isn't exactly standard high school curriculum.

[conradev]

"one kid out of about 3000 in the entire school who was intimidatingly competent with computers."

Thats me, although there are ~2000 kids at my school.