[1] It was developed by a group of volunteers and presided over by a team of six project administrators: Mircea-Cristian Racasan, Bruce Markham, Johann MacDonagh, Sander van Rossen, Jae Hyun, and William Lahti.

SharpOS began in November 2006[7] as a public discussion on the Mono development mailing list as a thread named Operating System in C#.

After attracting many participants, Michael Schurter created the SharpOS.org wiki and mailing list to continue the discussion at a more relevant location.

Soon after, the core developers (Bruce Markham, William Lahti, Sander van Rossen, and Mircea-Cristian Racasan) decided that they would design their own ahead-of-time (AOT) compiler to allow the operating system to run its boot sequence without using another programming language.

This was met with long periods of inactivity and few active developers due to lack of interest in unsafe kernel programming.