Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Schizophrenic Programmer Who Built an OS To Talk To God

Posted by Soulskill on from the there's-an-app-for-everything-these-days dept.

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.

16 of 452 comments (clear)

  1. Hmmm ... by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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".

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    1. Re:Hmmm ... by fyngyrz · · Score: 4, Funny

      why have we started covering the crazy end of the tech spectrum?

      What do you mean? We've always covered the GPL.

      --
      I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
    2. Re:Hmmm ... by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yes, he's ill. But the OS he wrote is better than any I've written so far--how about you?

      Not sure, it's been a while ... message-passing, multi-tasking microkernel in the early 90s. Hand-rolled bare-metal HD drive controller and interrupt stack, with full ability to read and write FAT filesystems from reading the specs from the technical manual.

      Haven't felt the need since OS class.

      I have no idea what his does, I had to block the image of the scrolling glimpse into the abyss which was the screenshot of the OS before it induced a seizure.

      Crazy doesn't mean stupid.

      Nor does it mean "newsworthy".

      I've known a couple of schizophrenics and various people with varying degrees mental illness. What I would not do is subject most of them to the interwebs without a buffer between them and what happens.

      Does pandering to showing the OS someone with schizophrenia wrote help them in any way? Is what he writes actually healthy for him? Or does it just let him wallow in some of his obsessions?

      So, sure, it's definitely blinking and flashing. Does it actually do anything other than embed his own rituals? I have no idea.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    3. Re:Hmmm ... by aglider · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Naaah! The media it's already full of such kind of people. But maybe this very one is the only to write an operating system ... Sorry, forget this. There was one in Redmond some time ago ...

      --
      Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
    4. Re:Hmmm ... by omnichad · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

    5. Re:Hmmm ... by amicusNYCL · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
  2. Ob by Hognoxious · · Score: 4, Insightful

    At least he didn't create systemd, gnome3, or the Windows 8 UI.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    1. Re:Ob by MouseR · · Score: 4, Funny

      Or any kind of demons.

  3. All Glory to the HypnoToad by CosaNostra+Pizza+Inc · · Score: 4, Funny

    "[The TempleOS V2.17 welcome screen] greets the user with a riot of 16-color, scrolling, blinking text; depending on your frame of reference"

    Does talking to "God" involve having an epileptic seizure?

    1. Re:All Glory to the HypnoToad by ArcadeMan · · Score: 3, Funny

      Excuse me, what does God need with a starship?

      --
      Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
  4. Be Gentle With Him by JerkyBoy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I remember that this individual caught a lot of flack for his OS in the past - he really does have a significant behavioral disorder, so if you provide feedback, do so in the gentlest of terms. He's a good guy with a difficult problem and a fun project.

    --


    Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest. -- Mark Twain
    1. Re:Be Gentle With Him by WaffleMonster · · Score: 4, Insightful

      your "good guy" is a racist.

      Continually find myself entertained by self appointed judges... many of whom claim to worship at the church of tolerance.

  5. Hmmm ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    I heard the kernel now supports some advanced calling conventions, such as the one where you scream while all the registers crab-walk pieces of your dismembered mind across the room and shove them onto the stack.

  6. Re:IEC 61508-3 anyone? by gman003 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Have you tried version 2.0 yet? It replaced those with loaves and fishes. Has a recurring 3-day downtime though.

  7. Re:Oh, please by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --
    "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
  8. Re:No thanks by Opportunist · · Score: 4, Funny

    Nah. Just at the endgame. You're thinking of Buddha.

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.