Ok, so my 12 year old daughter wants to out do Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Lord knows who else...

Hum.

TL;DR: Do not buy a fancy computer. Get her into some classes or something.

Please don't waste your $$$ on high CPU clock speeds. If you want to know why, please ask me.

Extra RAM is nice if you're working on bigger open source projects.

Tutors in this field tend to be really shady - I would be really careful with tutors - try to find a camp, school, or program near-ish to you and enroll her in it - the most critical things are to get her able to work on open source projects(she'll learn a ton), and to get her able to write a little code. The more time she can spend writing code, the better.

There's a website called code school - it kinda sucks, but the free lessons they have are a decent way to get working on something immediately.

After she has been working on programming for a year or so, do the following . . .

The following will be hard for you:

• Find an open source project that has an accepting community; Apache projects tend to welcome new people, but most of those are very complex backend systems projects which she will not understand for some years.
• get her involved with the open source project - many of the larger ones have IRC channels - look up what IRC is - she can join the chat channels for these projects and get in contact with developers working on the projects
• Many larger projects have a way to track bugs and problems - these bugs and problems have different priority levels - there is generally a "minor" priority level - it usually refers to something relatively small or unimportant, and these are MORE FREQUENTLY (not always) easier to work on - she should try to (on her own or with your help) find some of the minor ones and fix them for the project - this will help her ease her way into working on open source
• the projects always have instructions regarding how to set up their stuff. she will need to set it up and get their software building so she can make and test her changes
• to help her with this, it is best if you work on it too.

After she has done a little ittle bit of work on open source and has been programming for a year with you, you should start working with her to find her own medium-sized project (most projects until now should be SMALLER THAN 1000 LINES) a medium sized project may take up to six months and accomplish something significant that she has been wanting to understand or work on.

Following the completion of the medium sized project and the in-parallel open source work, you'll want to work with her to learn Data Structures and Algorithms. I recommend Steven Skiena's algorithm design manual to start with. When her mathematical skills mature she can move on to CLRS (just google CLRS).

After she has worked through and consumed all the material in skiena's book and finished her medium sized project, she should have been programming for at least two, maybe three years. She will be 15 or so, maybe 16. I do not have a good plan for you regarding high school. Find a high school that is strong in CS - find a local community college and use the money you saved on the computer to enroll her in a few classes for after school. Try to take the classes with her - you will have an extremely hard time keeping up with her ability now, and you will have to take a more managerial role in her education.

DEFINITELY help her to apply for internships at major tech companies during the summer!! put her open source project experience and her projects on the resume - FOCUS on the outcomes she achieved! like, "reduced scheduling time of mesos job scheduler by 5% during periods of high load" - I'm talking companies like monetate, google, quora, stackexchange, facebook, whatever - keep trying for these internships and do not get discouraged! Eventually, she should be able to get an internship (still 15-16 years old) do this every summer - put the internship experience on her university application and talk about it with university recruiters (hi I'm jenny I'm 17 and I worked at google last summer can I go to your school please? yes.) until she is a junior at university - then try to get a spring&summer internship - the longer term internship means she can request larger projects or more project ownership -

finally she'll graduate, and she can move back in with you - you and her can live off of your job and her savings from the internships until she finishes writing her new operating system.

I encourage you to try and understand the massiveness of the undertaking she is suggesting, and asking yourself whether you are prepared to patiently and encouragingly wait ten years or more for her to realize even the smallest, most basic part of her dream.

If you can do this, then you must do it, and fear nothing except what may slow her down.

CEO here of a startup currently going through Techstars. I have a technical background as a programmer as well so I can relate to both sides of this.

First, realize that this isn't about making a new operating system. Your kid has the drive to change some aspect of the world that she perceives to be bad. She has realized that some aspect of the world sucks, is causing people less happiness than it should, and needs to be disrupted.

So you first might want to lead her into a moment of reflection about what, specifically, it would mean for an operating system to be "better," from her perspective. In other words:

• What does she dislike about existing OS's?
• What does she wish they can do that they can't?
• Are they too slow? Are they too ugly? What is it?

Once she has clear what exactly it is that she doesn't like about existing operating systems, then she can ask: is it possible that other people also hate this same exact thing? If so, is it like, virtually everyone in the world hates this thing, or just a few people? She should ask some people to find out - friends, family, etc.

Once she's found a thing that everyone in the world hates, then congrats - she's found a pain point! Now she needs to come up with a solution for it, so she can make people's lives happier. This is the fun part, where she gets to imagine all sorts of ways to solve the problem. So she should invent some solutions and have fun with it. Since she's so bright, she'll probably invent solutions that other people aren't even thinking of.

Once she's done that, she should go back to those same people and see how they like her solution - do people agree it would solve the pain point? Some will probably say yes, some will say no. But, either way, she is sure to be surprised at how differently some people think about the problem than she does. How do her friends think differently from her about it? How about her parents, or older people in general? She should tweak her solution based on feedback, make an effort to understand where they're coming from, and iterate a few times.

Now, at some point in this process, she is bound to discover something about the way people think that blows her mind:

• She may realize that different generations of people have completely different ideas about what counts as an "intuitive" user interface, given that older folks grew up with mice and keyboards and younger folks grew up with touchscreens and gestures.
• She may discover that a certain amount of UI latency makes the OS feel "unstable" to a certain group of people, but is perfectly acceptable to a different group.
• She may discover that, for some strange reason, older people are way more resistant to interface changes than younger people, even if the new interface is "better."

Whatever it is, she is bound to discover something. Some realization like this is bound to materialize if she gets outside of her own head for even a day just to ask even a small handful of people what they want.

That's the realization you want her to have. Most people never have that realization. They go through life never quite understanding just how differently different people can think. They never quite understand how differently other people's desires and motivations can be from their own, and yet how they still always "make sense" from the other person's perspective. And it can be hard. Sometimes you want to yell at people at how ridiculous they're being - think about when you were engaged in a political debate, for instance. But it's extremely important to have that realization, especially if you want to start a business. Most startups fail because they fail to have this realization, in fact. They end up building something that they think is beautiful, but which does not satisfy a real functional need that other people have. They were on different wavelengths the whole time.

That's the realization she needs to have before anything else. If she really wants to change the world, she needs to become a psychological hacker first and a computer hacker second. There's no way to build an empire like Apple unless you put it first in your mind that you want to create hundreds of billions of dollars worth of happiness in real people's lives, and you can't do that until you learn to get outside your own head and validate what other people want. She needs to make sure she's always focused on that - not just building something aesthetically pleasing for herself.

Of course, she might not care about this. Instead, maybe she just wants to tackle a fun project to build something she thinks is elegant and beautiful while learning how to code. There's nothing wrong with that either - it just means she's approaching this from an artistic perspective rather than an entrepreneurial one. And that's totally fine. But when she's ready to change the world, she'll have to get back to learning how to be a psychological hacker - ultimately the more difficult, but more rewarding choice.

Thats awesome. There are app camps you can send kids to in the summer. Its like summer camp but tech focused. Also there are websites like treehouse (i think thats it), where you can learn for free or very little. Good luck with your nerdette!!!

r/learnprogramming

It's incredibly ambitious to create an OS like that and I'm not sure she quite gets the scope of it, but all the same, learning how to program in the appropriate languages is essential.

Statistically, the biggest hurdle is likely to be keeping her interested in computer science in the face of what may seem like an unwelcoming environment for a young girl.

I would look into Girls Who Code if you're around a city. Not only is it a great educational resource, but it's a really good idea for her to be around women with experience in tech. There's a huuuge drop off in girls' interest in STEM careers between the start and end of high school, so a role model in the field is a major boost.

She wants to outdo all the current operating systems that have thousands of experts working on them and cost a fortune to create?

Sorry, I think I may be missing something here: why are you so excited? Kids often have wild dreams (I'd guess): its like saying oh my god my kid wants to be an astronaut. Why does this wild desire have anything to do with reality? Is your daughter incredibly intelligent/ driven and you believe she can succeed?

This is ridiculous.

I also don't really know what you need to know? She needs to learn programming, computer architecture and maths. Buy some books. and a computer.

Look into the Hacker/Maker movement that is getting pretty big right now. There is a lot of hardware involved but there is also a lot of coding. Who knows maybe she will like the hardware as well. [Make] (http://makezine.com) might be a good place to start off.

I'm going to suggest a slightly different option. Expose her to wearable computers. Take a look at the tutorials available on www.adafruit.com And see the tutorials that use flora (an arduino based controller). You can write basic programs on it quite easily and it's something you could do together, because it involves working with hardware and software and gets her exposed to interesting materials, like sewing conductive thread into fabric, making paper interfaces using conductive ink, building objects in 3d printers, and using a bunch of different sensors to create works of art.

I'll start off by saying, it's not my intention to discourage you or your daughter. The field needs people with ambitious dreams like hers.

My qualifications are that I've been in the field for 10 years. I work at one of the big 4 companies (possibly a future competitor of yours, watch out! -- kidding)

When you (OP) were learning computers (or more importantly, when Bill Gates was learning computers) I think it was possible to fully understand a machine. You could buy a few books, do some reading, fiddle around, and FULLY understand your system.

Everything from the OS to the programming environment to the disk to the CPU. But going even further you could even understand the circuitry in the CPU if you were determined. I mean you could REALLY know your machine.

I don't think it's been possible to do that for decades now. A person who wants to learn the whole shebang could easily fill an entire small room with books from floor to ceiling. That's the state of computers today. It's gotten to the point where very few people understand the whole enchilada.

So why am I saying all of this? Well the OS is a remarkably special layer. It's that layer of glue between the hardware and the software. It's not just the desktop with icons, it's the most important bit on the entire machine. And it requries an incredible amount of knowledge of both hardware and software to make it work.

Think for a second about all the bajillions of different kinds of hardware out there. Desktops, laptops, servers, mainframes, phones, medical devices, etc, etc. Each of these has special requirements, and interfaces with other pieces of special hardware. Let's narrow it down to mainframes and desktops (the only options when gates was doing this). Even there, think about the number of choices.

Every CPU, for example, is entirely unique. Normal programmers never think about this, but the OS absolutely must. You want your OS to run on Intel AND MIPS? You're going to have to explicitly write code to support both of those. You want your OS to handle magnetic drives AND SSD drives? You're going to have to explicitly write code to support both of those. Same for keyboards and mice and USB and speakers and monitors and... ad nauseum.

I think you can see where this is going. In order to compete with Microsoft, you'd need to literally support all of the hardware they do. You could spend 100 lifetimes and never learn enough about each of these devices to support them all. Even microsoft doesn't support them officially, they just give the hardware folks the tools to add support themselves.

Linux has the same problem. In fact even to this day it's one of the biggest criticisms, that it hasn't caught up to the same level Microsoft is at. Linux got started in 1991. Linus did NOT start the project from scratch. He actually based his work on a project called Minix which was a super-simple academic teaching tool (hardly a serious real-world OS). Here's his original post to the usenet group:

I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).

As you can see, Linus started off with pretty humble expectations. He didn't believe his OS was anything special. The reason Linux did SO well is that the open source community rallied around the project and made it better one iteration at a time.

But trust me when I say, there's no reason Linux should have gotten so popular. Installing it used to be quite an adventure. More often than not your hardware wasn't fully supported. The only people who liked the OS were fellow programmers who enjoyed the novelty. Some might argue this is still true today.

As you can imagine, there's too much knowledge and specialization for any one person to possibly contain it all. Linus Torvalds is a figurehead mostly because he controls the code, but he certainly doesn't understand most of the hardware. Nor does he deal with the graphical desktop or anything else. The amount of code Torvalds has contributed personally is dwarfed by the amount that the community has contributed.

Bill gates was the last big overnight success story. He wrote MS-DOS (and parts of Windows) at a time where the world needed something like that. He got popular not because he wrote the better product, but because he was in the right place at the right time. Windows won the OS war less on technical merit, and more because they won over enough of the hardware vendors (loyalty counts).

Apple actually almost died. Let's not forget that. Their popularity today is definitely not over their core OS. It's over their sleek UI and usability. And it's a status symbol now I guess? I dunno. But Apple does something special most others don't: they strictly limit the hardware. How nice for them, that they don't have to worry about supporting all those other hardware vendors. But it's kinda brilliant when you think about it, not having to compete for the same demographic as Microsoft.

The reason I'm telling you all of this is so that you can set some realistic expectations for your daughter. Most people I've seen who write an OS tend to narrow the scope significantly. Maybe they only support one kind of CPU, one kind of hard drive, maybe a few kinds of keyboards. As a learning exercise I can't encourage this kind of stuff enough. It's ambitious, error-prone, frustrating, but SO AMAZINGLY COOL that people still do this. If you want to encourage your daughter to do this, you'll be my hero of the day.

Buuut on her own... I hesitate to use the word "impossible" but it would be miraculous to see a single person create a viable competitor these days entirely on her own. I think what the world REALLY needs is another Linus Torvalds who has the vision, the technical know-how, but more importantly the LEADERSHIP to make this happen. Open source communities are like herding cats. And if your daughter really wants an open-source success story like Linus has, I a few big things you can do for her are:

• Encourage her technical growth EARLY ON (other commenters talk more about this than I will).
• Encourage her to contribute other open source projects. Not just for learning, but also it really helps to have a little name recognition later on.
• Encourage her to fork another OS project rather than start from scratch (not strictly necessary, but I think you can see why).
• Encourage her to reach out to the community and get feedback on her ideas.
• Encourage her to learn about leadership skills. This includes communication, diplomacy, being assertive, and expectation setting.

Software at this scale is far more hindered by people problems and image problems than by technical problems. Linus is a shining beacon in the open source community because he kicks people's asses when needed and gets the project back in line.

Another thing you should tell your daughter so she has a realistic idea of what's coming is that OS development is FRUSTRATING. I cannot emphasize this enough. Only certain personality types seem drawn to it. I mean this both technically and from a community standpoint. Everyone and their mother has an opinion on OS design. And they can be pretty mean about it, to be honest. So having a thick skin helps a lot.

Obviously what I've outlined here is probably the next 15 or 20 years of her life. This is the real deal, this is usually what it takes. I'm not trying to be discouraging. I really REALLY love hearing that people are excited by this stuff. But it's not for the faint of heart. So yeah if this is really what she wants, all I can say is make sure she has her expectations set and then support her learning and growth as much as you can.

Your daughter sounds really bright, and it's pretty cool that you want to support her like this.

Everyone here is talking about learning how to code, which is obviously important. But one key aspect of operating systems is being overlooked, and is often overlooked by programming whiz kids: aesthetics and user interface. Windows isn't #1 because it's the most technically capable OS—on the contrary, is has a lot of shortcomings that Linux fans will be happy to lecture you about—it's #1 because it's slick-looking and intuitive to use. Your grandma, your 6-year-old, and your colleague who got a virus from downloading free smileys can use Windows. The Next Big Thing would have to not only be technologically/ethically superior to Windows and Mac, but also overcome the limitations of accessibility and compatibility that have always kept open-source operating systems in (let's face it) a niche of nerds, which means it would be prudent for her to study design, ergonomics, psychology, etc. as well as programming.

Good luck!

You haven't mentioned had good she is at programming, but a good entry for kids is: https://scratch.mit.edu/ (She can then later switch to C (which is the primary language of OS development), but I wouldn't be surprised if C will frustrate her much more than the windows,mac and linux :) )

And while I don't want to dampen her enthusiasm for changing the world, writing a graphical OS from scratch isn't something even experienced people do alone... I might explain to her the system of linux (it's not really just one OS), and point her to the fact that she can pick out a part and improve or replace it for herself while sharing it with the rest of the world.

I have no experience in OS programming, but if you don't exactly want to recompile the linux kernel regularly I doubt you need a specifically strong processor. If she is starting from scratch a regular modern office PC would do. The first two things I would probably improve are hard drive space (and speed with an SSD) and main memory. But that might just be my experience where the standard computers fall short.

After quick googling, you probably also want to take an evening and read a bit of the intros in http://wiki.osdev.org/Main_Page and discuss/show it to her afterwards. If there is an associated forum, I bet they will also provide some information.

And one last thing:

She was very agitated that xp is no longer supported

She does realize that it is older then herself, right?

A way to explain this, might also be the fact that she grows out of old cloths so you have to get new ones. New hardware is coming out constantly so you have to make OS updates to be able to use them. Similarly when you find a hole (security breach) somewhere you have to stitch it. Sometimes you also just like to improve the look or functionality by adding something.

I have a suggestion, a small one multiplied by 20 or so. Start a raspberry pi super computer. Rig up a set amount of raspberry pi's and get them working together. Which has been done before. Here's the trick though, once they are all working together see if she can have them divvy up big problems without one being the leader. Independently working on a chunk of a problem while working together.

Cool! But building an operating system (one to rival the modern giants, at least) is an enormous undertaking. There would be so much to learn first. To ensure that path is interesting and fun, my suggestion would be that she perhaps get started by looking at the embedded aspects of programming. Which is to say, programming for microcontrollers and FPGAs and the like.

This is because:

• You learn on a real-world platform. It is FAR more satisfying (imho) to see that first LED blink to the tune of your code rather than a "hello world!" prompt on a monitor.
• You can build things with your embedded projects. You can start solving problems right away, which is very rewarding. Why not build a persistence-of-vision clock? Or an LED light cube music visualiser? Or a device that automatically opens a door when you knock on it with the right sequence?
• It teaches you about being frugal with your code. On a tiny MCU, every cycle counts. You learn to optimise. You learn to consider whether you have the power and memory on tap to tackle a problem or whether you need to look for a better way. This is something that's hard to get a sense for on normal computers, particularly when starting out. It would also, needless to say, be very important if you wanted to build a sleek, efficient operating system to best the competition!

That sounds awesome!

Show her FreeBSD, it's great to get to learn more about how an OS works, especially when working on the console.

For programming there are so many resources and stuff around... I and many others find the Clojure community very very friendly and helpful to new people, also they participate in Google Summer of Code and have a lot of smaller OSS projects she can start participating.

She's now 12

...

the 12 year old rig, which was a monster in it's time

Huh. Same thing happened to me. The last computer I built was in 2002, right before my son was born.

OP you might want to hit up r/learnprogramming and r/cscareerquestions as well as Linux from Scratch. (I know she doesn't want to make linux but it's still good to learn it.)

Edit: and if she has no coding experience check out Scratch from MIT which is a visual programming language that will help her grasp the logic.

If she is ready to jump into a programming language check out Khan Academy or check out the sidebar of r/learnprogramming for some resources.

It's great that your daughter is so keen on computers and wanting to learn. One thing that I would like to emphasise at her age is to focus on breadth and not depth.

So whilst learning to program and doing a lot of it is not bad thing I would definitely explore related areas, if only a little. For instance electronics, particularly digital electronics, is a great foundation for a broader understanding of the operation of a computer - moving up the scale a little programming for an embedded device (Think Arduino or Mbed) is a significantly different proposition to programming for full desktop-style computer and will develop a broader set of programming skills.

Well, if she truly wants to play around making her own OS, she should learn C and assembly. When I was in high school (~5 years ago) I taught myself assembly for TI-83 calculators so I could write a game on it. It was an amazing starting point for low level programming and understanding for how a computer actually works.

If she eventually gets fed up with it (making an OS is a huge endeavor), let her play around with a Linux OS like Arch Linux. It'll teach her quite a lot about all of the components needed for getting a system up and running and give her something to play around with to the point of basically making her own user experience (which it sounds like she wants).

One very good resource on the topic is Modern Operating Systems by Andrew Tanenbaum. It may get complex but with a some effort you can understand pretty well how an OS works.