The HelenOS project was formed in late October 2004, when the six developers grouped and decided to
adopt previous work of {\JJ} on the SPARTAN kernel\footnote{The SPARTAN kernel has been developed by {\JJ} since 2001.} as a foundation for their new operating system.
The team had then worked on a specification\cite{helenos-spec} until March 8, 2005. The specification
was based on \MD's draft and incorporated many suggestions from other members of the team.
The biggest part of the discussion was concerned about how many and what processor architectures we will support.
At that time, the SPARTAN kernel supported ia32 and mips32 to the extent that kernel threads could be scheduled.
The ia32 port could do some very basic virtual memory operations and was capable of SMP
service. Moreover, the mips32 port ran only in the msim simulator. We realized the need to support at least
one 64-bit architecture and have long discussed whether it should be amd64 or ia64. We also considered ppc64.
At the end, we decided to declare support for three new architectures and five architectures in total, including
both amd64 and ia64 and also ppc32.