Preface

This text was originally conceived and written back in 2020. I was fascinated by this intriguing operating system that I had stumbled upon by accident, and as I was reading some of Milton’s poetry at the time – and Dante’s Inferno as well, of course – I thought it would only be fitting to write this book in a very archaic tone. Not to mention that writing it gave me something to do during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The goal was to write a programming and technology book unlike any other out there; one that would be interesting to read simply because of how differently it presented all of the concepts, almost as though you were an explorer who actually was going through the operating system, delving deeper into its various systems. Indeed, that is precisely how I went about discovering this OS and its programming language, Limbo, and this book very much does detail my exact journey through the inner workings of this OS.

It is, and never was, meant to be a definitive guide to anything, and my intent was simply to write something about this operating system so that it would not be completely forgotten, and to write about it in a way to make a rather dry subject matter somewhat more interesting. There almost certainly are plenty of mistakes or inaccuracies in this text.

Nevertheless, I feel as though all the work that went into it would be lost if I did not share it at all, and I am, therefore, presenting this book simply as is. This is the exact state that I had left it in when I stopped working on it back in 2020, with only minor edits here and there to remove any mention of my real-life name and identity.

I am releasing this under a Creative Commons license and encourage anyone to use this work as the basis for whatever they wish to do with it!

— Hexaitos, 2026