In the summer of 1991, I was inspired by Linus Torvalds early work on Linux, and decided to make an Operating System as my senior project. The goal was to build a system that had fundamental systems built modularly, so that future students could try replacing individual components with their own work, and seeing how it affected the system.

I had a 486DX and a book on the internals of the chipset. We got the boot loader completed, and a basic menu of functions.

The acronym came before the words; Fundamental Research Education Device