Ancient Web: SerenityOS Documented Its First Year in a Page Its Own Browser Could Read

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

One way to celebrate a new web browser is to publish a page simple enough for that browser to read. Andreas Kling did exactly that for the first birthday of SerenityOS.

Read the original first-year history.

Kling dated the page October 10, 2019, one year after the project's initial shared repository commit. He deliberately kept the HTML and CSS lightweight because Serenity's own browser was supposed to display it. At the end of the chronological tour is the milestone: the anniversary page being viewed inside that very browser.

This is not a 1990s website. It belongs here as a historical exception: a preserved, contemporary account of rebuilding personal-computer fundamentals, written to satisfy the limitations of an immature browser. The technical constraints that shaped early websites have become the subject of an intentional reenactment.

From filesystem parser to graphical desktop

The sequence begins with four pieces: a utility library named AK, an ELF executable loader, an ext2 filesystem parser, and a simple graphical toolkit running on SDL. Kling explains that the first commit gathered earlier experiments into one repository after a period of programming on a machine running Slackware 11.

The dated milestones turn an intimidating operating-system project into a progression of small victories. November 2018 brought virtual-machine execution. In January 2019 a graphical desktop first ran on the project's own kernel. February brought a font editor, clock, menus, and an early file manager.

By March, networking had advanced to a successful ping and an IRC client. April included a Visual Basic-inspired GUI-building tool, a rudimentary GCC port, and the essential milestone for almost any hobby operating system: Snake.

By September, the tour shows Doom and the beginnings of CSS support. October concludes with HTML rendered in Serenity's own browser. Kling also linked monthly progress videos and thanked code contributors, testers, readers, and people gathering around the project online.

Unlike a retrospective assembled years later, this page captures the developer's own priorities and delight at specific moments. It is a record of a workbench while the work was still on it, rather than a museum label written after the fact.

Explore the 2019 anniversary page and its original screenshots.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.