SharpOS began in November 2006 as a public discussion on the Mono development mailing list as a thread named Operating System in C#. After attracting many participants, Michael Schurter created the SharpOS.org wiki and mailing list to continue the discussion at a more relevant location. Soon after, the core developers (Bruce Markham, William Lahti, Sander van Rossen, and Mircea-Cristian Racasan) decided that they would design their own ahead-of-time (AOT) compiler to allow the operating system to run its boot sequence without using another programming language. Once the AOT compiler was far enough developed, the team then started to code the kernel. This was met with long periods of inactivity and few active developers due to lack of interest in unsafe kernel programming. On 1 January 2008, the SharpOS team made their first milestone release public, this is the first version of the software to appear in the SharpOS SourceForge package repository available for general public use.
