"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe" - Carl Sagan

What is a good place to draw the line? Kernel? BIOS? Microcode? Hardware?

I say hardware and that 1072 bytes beats the shit out of that:

https://github.com/oriansj/stage0/blob/master/stage1/SET.s

pfft, you aren't counting the megabytes of intel microcode that emulate this

I really don't understand why more people in this generation don't run their own strip mining operations for processor fabrication anymore. It's incredibly helpful in both understanding just how many man hours go into a single google search as well as teaching one how to get the most performance out of every last electron.

I'm even fine with OpenGL if the functionality is impressive. (Generated textures, models, great visuals etc.) A text noneditor is not.

Aye, in my day we had to smelt the ore first, but before we could do that we had to ... (drifts off)

In my day we had to invent tools first, but before we could do that we had to evolve from unicellular microbes.

But someone else has already tested that code.

shaders?

Time to write a text editor in a shader, I guess.

or with a cellular automata (bonus if one writes a brainfuck to cellular automata compiler)