It took Satoshi about 18 months of work to get to roughly the first version of Bitcoin.

Satoshi tried to buy bitcoin dot com first, but it was not available since a professional domain speculator bought it first. I wonder how Roger Ver ended up buying the domain, or if Satoshi was referring to him here.

It appears very clear that he was doing this work by himself, and then started to contact other people, one by one through email, and by groups through email lists. Based on the emails, Bitcoin really doesn't seem to have been created by a group.

Satoshi mainly used Windows and was not great with Linux, but used MinGW as the main compiler (MinGW provides GCC to Windows, which is a Linux compiler), and only the Microsoft compiler (mentioned as VC) for debugging.