The Schizophrenic Programmer Who Built an OS To Talk To God

rossgneumann writes: Terry Davis, a schizophrenic programmer, has spent 10 years building an operating system to talk to God. He's done this work because God told him to. According to the TempleOS charter, it is "God's official temple. Just like Solomon's temple, this is a community focal point where offerings are made and God's oracle is consulted." [The TempleOS V2.17 welcome screen] greets the user with a riot of 16-color, scrolling, blinking text; depending on your frame of reference, it might recall DESQview, the Commodore 64, or a host of early DOS-based graphical user interfaces. In style if not in specifics, it evokes a particular era, a time when the then-new concept of "personal computing" necessarily meant programming and tinkering and breaking things.

Comments

Hmmm ...

[gstoddart]

While this is creepy, and might be interesting in a clinical sense ... why have we started covering the crazy end of the tech spectrum?

I'm afraid this just reads like "batshit crazy guy writes gibberish OS, come look at our ads".

Re:Hmmm ...

[omnichad]

Not just creepy and crazy - but also a regular commenter here on Slashdot.
http://slashdot.org/~templeos

Re:Hmmm ...

[amicusNYCL]

I have no idea what his does

Here's a peek:

God said 640x480 16 color graphics is a covenant like circumcision. Children
will do offerings. Think of 16 colors like the Simpson's cartoons.

I wonder if God suggested The Simpsons as a frame of reference.

We do not put any hooks for future changes. "Perfect" means we always act as
though it is final, for all time. Microsoft allowed the Windows BMP file format
to adapt to the future and it became grotesque.

There is a limit of 100,000 lines of code for all time, not including
applications and demos. Code comments count, however. 3rd party libraries are
banned because they circumvent the intent of this limit. The vision is a
Commodore 64 ROM -- a fixed core API that is the only dependency of
applications. Currently, there are 80,668 lines of code.

One platform. x86_64 PC compatibles.

One driver for each class of device. Limited exceptions are allowed. With
divergent device capabilities, it is a nightmare for user applications and what
is gained? A three button mouse is like a leg you cannot put weight on.

No networking, so malware is not an issue.

No encryption or passwords. Files are compressed, not encrypted.

Documents are not for printing. They're dynamic, intended for the screen.

Just one 8x8 fixed-width font. No Unicode, just Extended ASCII.

No multimedia. Sounds and images will be primarily calculated in real-time,
not fetched from storage.

Re:Oh, please

[BarbaraHudson]

He's a schizophrenic, after first being diagnosed as bipolar. The world he sees is not, in many ways, the world we live in. His use of the "n" word when attacked on-line crossed the bounds of our social conventions, but I wouldn't rule out some form of aphasia as well - some words don't seem to mean the same to him as to you or I.

After all, he calls himself an atheist, but God has commanded him to build an OS, and this doesn't engender any cognitive dissonance - to the contrary, it "proves" that God is speaking to him. And he's only taking one of his medications ...

Mental health issues are not cut-and-dried. Try living with a serious mental illness for a while and then get back to us, mkay? It's not as easy as you think.