Thank you for this. This explains a lot. In terms of how this was implemented, did he just basically load up a bitcoin client, and a miner program, and then the first block mined automatically became the genesis block?
Satoshi wrote the first Bitcoin client. There weren't any to "load up", nor were there any miners. What satoshi had to do was modify the original Bitcoin client to mine a block with very specific parameters. He then took the raw data of the mined block and then hard coded the raw data into the first version of the client prior to release.