Long time ago (2006-2007), during high school, I got quite interested in operating systems and computer architecture.
At that time, I spent hours reading about things such as Interrupt Resquests (IRQ), Real and Protected Mode, bootloaders, kernels, 
and these many other things that did not have a tangible meaning to a high-school student. Well, there is nothing better than
practice to get a "feel" of how things really work.

This project - Centrix - was my pet operating system. Believe me or not, it made it to the Protected Mode. At that time,
when I finally got access to the Protected Mode, it felt like I had landed on the moon. Playing around with operating system
development can be quite challenging: when something goes wrong, you don't always have a `printf` available to you....

Centrix featured a freaking !!two-stage boot loader!!. A 512 bytes FAT12 file reader that would load its kernel in the floppy disk.
After loading its kernel, it would jump into Protected Mode and list the amount of RAM memory available, indexing every 4kb on a very primitive implementation of malloc.
You could say that Centrix suffered of ADHD, as I never got around implementing multi-tasking.

I keep this repository as a memento of great time, and a token of appreciation for those that inspired me to learn more and more about computer science.

I am very thankful for the many strangers at forums[2] and wikis[3] that helped me through this jorney.
A special thanks goes to Brandon Friesen and his amazing kernel development tutorial[1]. [1] was my main guide through this journey,
and Brandon was quite nice through the many email messages we exchanged when I was stuck.

While I am grateful to Brandon and the members of OSDever.net, I have to single out one person: Viktoria Tkotz - a.k.a. grandma Vicky.
Grandma Vicky was a Brazilian M.D. that used her free time to author a series of blog posts on cryptography (and later on operating systems).
Through her work, I was able to learn the basics of cryptography and later the basics of operating system. She was great at explaining complex
concepts using intuitive analogies. Much of her work is still available at [4] (in Portuguese).

Danilo Gasques (San Diego, 06/2020)

References:
[1] http://www.osdever.net/tutorials/view/brans-kernel-development-tutorial
[2] http://www.osdever.net
[3] http://wiki.osdev.org/
[4] http://numaboa.com.br