This would be a really fun competition in a maddening way. If somebody put up a VM to start with, I'd bite. Or at least, if there was some kind of criteria for a starting point, putting together a bare bones distro wouldn't be too hard. I can see bootstrapping a basic editor using cat and working all the way through a TCP stack, DNS, etc. but my mind blanks at implementing TLS. Seems like it would be a requirement to do anything meaningful on the internet at this point, but I wouldn't even know where to begin.