Thereby hangs a tale.

in 1977, I was working at udel with Ed Szurkowski, the first sysadmin of the Unix systems we got in 1976 (first machine was an 11/70). Ed was a gifted engineer and did all kinds of neat work on v6. He later went to the Labs once he got his PhD and I lost track of him.

Ed got tired of watching the bootstrap slowness, and wrote a system call that did the following:

1. load kernel in memory from system call argument

2. put special signature in low memory telling bootstrap "look in memory"

3. reboot via reset.

Now, this works, because back then, ROM boot code did not zero memory. Memory was unchanged across reset. So the bootstrap could find the magic bits and start the kernel.

I've lost the code, I carried the listings for decades but finally dumped them. A shame.

But I'm wondering: is Ed's work in 1977 the first "kernel boots kernel" or was there something before?