A Technical Look Inside TempleOS

jones_supa writes: TempleOS has become somewhat of a legend in the operating system community. Its sole author, Terry A. Davis, is a special kind of person, who has a tendency to appear in various places with a burst of strange comments. Nevertheless, he has spent the past 12 years creating a new operating system from scratch, and has shipped a functional product. An article takes a constructive technical look at the internals of TempleOS: installation, shell, file explorer, hypertext system, custom HolyC programming language, and interaction with hardware. The OS ships with a suite of several tools and demos as well. To see the sheer amount of content that's been written here over the years, to see such effort expended on a labor of love, is wonderfully heart-warming. In many ways TempleOS seems similar to systems such as the Xerox Alto, Oberon, and Plan 9; an all-inclusive system that blurs the lines between programs and documents.

Comments

Interesting person

[spiritplumber]

This guy hangs out on hackernews, he's... well frankly he's a bit of a religious nut, but he doesn't preach at you or anything (unless you ask). Definitely a work of passion.

Re:Interesting person

[spiritplumber]

My understanding is that it's some form of tourette's rather than actual racism.

Re:Interesting person

[Nrrqshrr]

This is the internet, where not calling people out with racial slurs is a crime on its own.

Re:Interesting person

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, he's pretty hateful: http://www.reddit.com/user/TempleOS_Terry_Davis . Bear in mind that not all schizophrenics are assholes.

Re:Interesting person

[ArcadeMan]

That's right, you sentient non-translucent person!

Re:Interesting person

[Eravnrekaree]

People may have different religious views than you, but, so what, its a free country. The manner in which in this society we have this oversensitization to being offended and against someones views and opinions offending someone is being used to shut down free speech and the free expression and exchange of ideas and information. Its actually the worst with the leftists who are most intolerant of anyone who does not agree with their views on matters and use "being offended" by Christians to basically attack and shut down anyone who is a professed Christain from being able to talk about their own beliefs and profess it. There's in an old phrase, I disagree with what you say but I respect your right to say it. So many people today, especially those on the left, are becoming increasingly opposed to people being able to express themselves and use their own perverse, twisted and insane defintions of "tolerance" to shut down any dissenting or opposing viewpoints, especially if you are a Christian and someone doesnt like your viewpoints, you are accused and labelled as being "intolerant" and "hateful" just by expressing your own viewpoints and religious ideas, not by trying to shut down others ability to express their own. What is going on here is that "intolerance" is now expressing a view that other people think are offensive, rather than trying to shutdown others peoples ability to express their own views. They have in effect turned everything upside down. Now if it is "tolerant" to suppress and censor anyone who says something you offend with, and "intolerant" for anyone to express views you disagree with. By basically saying that if you disagree with leftist atheists, muslims or whatever, you are somehow "intolerant", leftists are shutting down free speech and claiming to be "tolerant" when in fact they are "intolerant".

Re:Interesting person

[myrdos2]

Now that I've actually RTFA, as other people are saying he's a schizophrenic. Pretty cool operating system though, except for this:

TempleOS does not use memory protection. All code in the system runs at ring 0, the highest privilege level, meaning that a stray pointer write could easily crash the entire system.
...
He argues that Linux is designed for a use case that most people don’t have. Linux, he says, aims to be a 1970s mainframe, with 100 users connected at once. If a crash in one users’ programs could take down all the others, then obviously that would be bad. But for a personal computer, with just one user, this makes no sense. Instead the OS should empower the single user and not get in their way.

This only makes sense if you're running one program at a time. But if you're running 20 or more programs at once, like a regular user, then a bug in any one of them can cause weird behavior in the others, and it's almost impossible to debug or fix.

Re:Interesting person

[avgjoe62]

Intolerant is baking a cake for a person that's on their fourth marriage while refusing to bake one for a lesbian couple that is finally able to marry after twenty years together.

Re:Interesting person

[JackieBrown]

Nice little shield you have built yourself for liberals/democrats.

Automatically classifing dislikable traits as part of the party opposite of yourself might feel natural, but it's intellectually dishonest.

Re:Interesting person

[JackieBrown]

If this is not an example of first world problems, I'm not sure what is.

Re:Interesting person

[swb]

Believe in god(s), demon(s), flying saucers, Cthulhu, animal spirits, whatever the fuck you want. I really don't care. ...until you want to shape the lives of others with rules or demands originated from your beliefs, at that point, kindly shut the fuck up and go back to whatever hole you crawled out of.

And I'm universally bigoted in this regard. Christian wants prayer or creationism in school? Fuck you. Muslim wants special meals served or no drawings of Mohammed? Fuck you. Buddhist doesn't want me to squash bugs in my house? Fuck you. Orthodox Jew won't sit next to a woman on a public airplane? Fuck you.

If your beliefs require anyone else to change their behavior in public, your beliefs are broken.

I will (sort of) agree that some groups (and not just the left) likes to use certain buzzwords to shutdown debate. Not 100% in agreement with some aspect of Israeli government policy? No, you're not an anti-semite.

Re:Interesting person

[antiperimetaparalogo]

Intolerant is baking a cake for a person that's on their fourth marriage while refusing to bake one for a lesbian couple that is finally able to marry after twenty years together.

"Intolerant" is defining "intolerant" as: "Intolerant is baking a cake for a person that's on their fourth marriage while refusing to bake one for a lesbian couple that is finally able to marry after twenty years together"...

Re:Interesting person

[aitikin]

I'm reading the comment your replied again and again. I literally see nothing wrong with it and nothing to prompt such a...harsh response. He's a religious nut. By all means, everything I've ever seen pertaining to him indicates this. I don't understand where your rant is coming from. Even my most adamantly religious friends consider this guy a nut...

Re:Interesting person

[ckatko]

We ABSOLUTELY should make allowances in our "compete to be the first to take offense" culture for men and women like this. We shouldn't just care about the handicapped people that make us feel better about ourselves, or make us feel pity ("Aww, look at the wheelchair kid."). There are just as many people who are handicapped and are NOT pleasant to be around, but they're still people inside.

I started checking out his videos and he most certainly has something wrong in there (a VICE article mentions he has schizophrenia), and while the words he uses would offend most people, I don't think it's out of calculated malice at all. He really doesn't seem to be "all there." He has trouble putting sentences together, repeats himself. He believes God tells him to do this, and that, and speaks very casually about having a direct connection to desire of God.

IIRC, Schizophrenia is a disease where you're adapt at finding connections and relationships between ideas (like a typical smart or genius person) but the difference here is that the connections are false. Like "the Jews," "the blacks", "the Illuminati" or whatever are controlling X/Y/Z. Hence they tend to be vary paranoid because it's easy for them to put together connections (someone looks at you as you drive by == government is spying on them) that aren't there.

If we truly want to understand other people (and we should), we have to allow for the fact we're going to find a lot of uncomfortable ideas and actions. But trying to understand someone who is broken doesn't make us broken. They're not an actual threat to us and our ideals. Reaching out, and understanding these people is far more important than protecting "need" to feel comfortable in our environment. The only other option is to completely ignore and deny they exist at all.

Re:Interesting person

[Eravnrekaree]

Apples and oranges. there is a tendancy to compare a speech issue to what the law actually is regarding a non-speech issue. The gay wedding cake issue is not about speech, the baker didnt deny the gay couple any free speech rights. The baker was also not playing cop, businesses generally have a right to refuse services (not that I am wholly in agreement with this), and there are exceptions to that, the case concerns how far those exceptions go. About the issue regarding legality of acts in relation to speech, For instance, you have every right to suggest that say, driving 200 mph on residential streets should be legal, that its not legal does not mean your free speech rights have been violated to hold your own opinion on this matter. Free speech does not give you the right to do things that you can use your free speech rights to advocate should be legal. Its important with the wedding cake issue, was that they were not refusing service to all gays for any service, only the cake which was being used for the weddings. Obviously, to refuse service to gays for say, table seating in a restaurant, is a situation with different circumstances. Not all christians support the idea of refusing service to gays on the issue of providing a cake, basically becuase many christians have a view that its not our position to judge them, even though it is against the tenants of the religion. Not all christian denominations oppose gay unions, either, if you are gay there are several Christian denominations to choose from that would accept you and hold your ceremony. The people that were pressing these buttons on the gay wedding cake issue had plenty of bakers who would bake a gay wedding cake for them, they actually went from baker to baker to find one who one who would refuse to do it so they could then castigate them. Personally, I do not agree with refusing to make a wedding cake for gays, if I am running a business and someone comes to me wanting a lawful product or service I would not deny it to them on account of their sexual preferences. It is my view that gay marriage should not be legal, you cannot just change the definitions of words. I am supportive of civil unions for gays that give them the same benefits, they can call it a wedding if they want but thats not what it should officially be titled on paper. Yes, its about definitions of words, words do mean things, you cannot call a cat a dog and just change those definitions willy nilly, the very definition of marriage is a union between man and women for the purpose of producing children, it is important that Marriage mean something and have a clear definition for the function it is mean to encourage, to be something that is to promote family values as this is a critical bedrock for a civilization.

Re:Interesting person

[drinkypoo]

Yeah, it's exactly the opposite of what I want. I've been thinking lately it would be nice to have a Linux distribution which was really based around containers. I'd like to containerize applications, or groups of applications, from one another — let alone any daemon-type services, which should obviously also be in their own containers, or reasonable groups thereof. Another case where if only systemd were not insane, I would love to use it.

Re:Interesting person

[Eravnrekaree]

I would also like to add that my previous comments regarding the loss of free speech in our society was about civility and issues regarding etiquette rather than exclusively the law. Obviously, etiquette and law are different things, I do lament the loss of the ability to openly profess ones views generally in a society, regardless as to the legal status and condition around such speech issues. On the gay wedding cake issue, I can see there is a problem there and the denial of service is not something I agree with.

Re:Interesting person

[antiperimetaparalogo]

Intolerant is baking a cake for a person that's on their fourth marriage while refusing to bake one for a lesbian couple that is finally able to marry after twenty years together.

"Intolerant" is defining "intolerant" as: "Intolerant is baking a cake for a person that's on their fourth marriage while refusing to bake one for a lesbian couple that is finally able to marry after twenty years together"...

No,it's not. It is intolerant to say to someone that you are not as important, not worthy of the same consideration as anyone else. How else would you define intolerant?

An irony... i can't think a way to define "intolerant" without being... intolerant!

Re:Interesting person

[LWATCDR]

Not really. I know lots of liberals that are very racist but in a very dishonest way. They will go march in a MLK day parade but send their children to all white private schools and only have friends that are upper middle class and usually white.
While I know a good number of people that are conservative that have all sorts of friends.
So you are labeling broad categories of people with attributes that are not intrinsic to their stated belief systems.

Re:Interesting person

[bobbied]

Intolerant is baking a cake for a person that's on their fourth marriage while refusing to bake one for a lesbian couple that is finally able to marry after twenty years together.

Actually, intolerance is refusing to let people hold their own views and forcing them to act in violation of these views. Intolerance is forcing others to accept YOUR views over theirs.

Not baking a cake doesn't prevent anybody from getting married... Not delivering pizza to the reception prevent people from getting married either. Yet both are seen as intolerance that must be stamped out for the good of all.

So who's really being intolerant? The people who can still get married like they say they wanted, but have to find another place to get their cake and pizza or the baker and pizzeria owner that is being forced into doing something they think is wrong? Tolerance says, OK, I don't agree with you, but I can take my business elsewhere so I will.

Re:Interesting person

[tnk1]

"Progress" and "progressive" are subjective terms. They could very easily mean racism and religion, if you determined that such things were the way of the "future". If you simply went by left-right orientations, you'd have your Communists in places like North Korea and Cambodia be "progressives". When applied to such regimes, the term "progressive" loses any positive connotation, but could still be considered to be "progress", if you mean progress towards an autarkic, authoritarian state.

   

Re:Interesting person

[bobbied]

Intolerant is baking a cake for a person that's on their fourth marriage while refusing to bake one for a lesbian couple that is finally able to marry after twenty years together.

"Intolerant" is defining "intolerant" as: "Intolerant is baking a cake for a person that's on their fourth marriage while refusing to bake one for a lesbian couple that is finally able to marry after twenty years together"...

No,it's not. It is intolerant to say to someone that you are not as important, not worthy of the same consideration as anyone else. How else would you define intolerant?

Forcing someone to act in violation of their personal convictions just because YOU think you are right is intolerance. Not accepting that somebody's views may differ from yours and deciding to make an issue about it to force them into submission to your view (no matter how right) is intolerance.

Tolerance is recognizing that others can be wrong and it's not your job to correct them; that you can choose to just walk away and let them be as wrong as they like, even if it's inconvenient for you. That's tolerance...

Re:Interesting person

[Anonymous Coward]

Humans are relevance junkies. There's a literal chemical reward response in our brains when we connect bits of information together. It's an evolutionary adaptation that rewards smarter humans.

Unfortunately it's not hard to trigger this mechanism with bad but properly formatted information. Gossip. Social media. Conspiracy theories. Sensationalistic journalism. - These are "junk knowledge" akin to junk food. They taste good and feel good but you end up sick and unhealthy if you consume too much of them.

Many say that a whole lot of religious material falls in to this category. Seemingly perfect internal consistency is a dangerous and comfortable trap. It leads you to reject outside information because it's unpalatable and uncomfortable.

Like healthy food, healthy knowledge is sometimes tough, gritty, bitter and often takes getting used to. The rewards aren't immediate and preparation takes more time and effort.

The temptation to go out and get a drive-through burger is analogous to sitting in front of the TV to become informed.

It's also not hard to see why so many people are, frankly, fat and stupid.

Re:Interesting person

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

Have you looked into chroot or FreeBSD Jails? That might give you the compartmentalization you need without the overhead of virtualization.

Re:Interesting person

[WaffleMonster]

TempleOS does not use memory protection. All code in the system runs at ring 0, the highest privilege level, meaning that a stray pointer write could easily crash the entire system.

This only makes sense if you're running one program at a time. But if you're running 20 or more programs at once, like a regular user, then a bug in any one of them can cause weird behavior in the others, and it's almost impossible to debug or fix.

I think this is all interesting. There have been research projects like singularity which seek to punt responsibility for system protection to VM which executes all code. Lets not forget the Linux kernel is massive and monolithic but it still works reasonably well.

Today we have operators no longer bothering with traditional multi-user security facilities because it is so easy to just spin up a new virtual machine or isolation something in a docker like container.

I'm not defending TempleOS or approaches but I find exploring what seem like dumb ideas interesting.

Re:Interesting person

[almitydave]

Intolerant is baking a cake for a person that's on their fourth marriage while refusing to bake one for a lesbian couple that is finally able to marry after twenty years together.

"Intolerant" is defining "intolerant" as: "Intolerant is baking a cake for a person that's on their fourth marriage while refusing to bake one for a lesbian couple that is finally able to marry after twenty years together"...

No,it's not. It is intolerant to say to someone that you are not as important, not worthy of the same consideration as anyone else. How else would you define intolerant?

Forcing someone to act in violation of their personal convictions just because YOU think you are right is intolerance. Not accepting that somebody's views may differ from yours and deciding to make an issue about it to force them into submission to your view (no matter how right) is intolerance.

Tolerance is recognizing that others can be wrong and it's not your job to correct them; that you can choose to just walk away and let them be as wrong as they like, even if it's inconvenient for you. That's tolerance...

And it's important to remember that some intolerance is good: we as a civilized society do not tolerate murder or injustice for example (at least that's our goal - we often fall short but not for lack of trying). So "intolerance" should not be used an automatically dirty word; if an intolerant position is bad, it's not enough to label it so - you have to demonstrate why.

We as a free society NEED to tolerate differences of opinion, especially on important matters. It's sort of a prerequisite.

Re:Interesting person

[Bacon Bits]

Obviously.

Like TFA says, you need to look at it like a research OS. One that has critical flaws that are designed in, but that design has a purpose: to function in a different way. Doing so can expose new lines of thinking and novel approaches to "solved" problems. No, it won't function in a real world of networked computing, but it's not supposed to fit into that idiom. It still has some very interesting ideas. Spending time solving every problem again isn't the goal. There was a time when virtual memory didn't exist, for example, and computing still worked well enough to run businesses, banks, telephone networks, and governments. We don't need a research OS to show us that virtual address spaces are useful. We know that already. So, ignore it as not relevant, and do something that is a novel approach.

Looking at the ideas in TempleOS like they will replace Linux or Windows is silly, but they might give us ideas for new types of computing. The idea that everything would be better as a Linux device is, quite honestly, poisonous to the development real progress in the field of computing as a whole.

Maybe TempleOS is like non-Euclidean geometry. Sometimes need drives the development of new math -- Newton's development of Calculus -- and sometimes the math is developed and sits idle, doing nothing for nearly a hundred years before changing the world -- like Boolean algebra. A computer system is just a very complicated set of mathematical rules. Changing the rules of math and seeing what happens has been one of the major forces of change, as different systems are often best expressed in different forms of mathematics.

Does TempleOS make it easier to understand how computers operate? Does it make it easier to learn what a program actually is? Is it just an example of being closer to the bare metal, like you were flipping bit switches on an old Altair 8800? What if, for example, a system like this makes it very easy to model artificial intelligence? It can basically reprogram itself, after all, as everything is JIT and source code is readily available for literally everything at all times. That seems incredibly powerful. Is it possible to write a self-refining program in HolyC?

Just because I don't understand what something could be used to do doesn't mean it's useless. It might just mean I don't have a very good understanding yet. The questions to ask are, "What kind of system benefits from the design of TempleOS? What kind of system benefits from raw, unimpeded access from the user or input to the hardware?"

Re:Interesting person

[spire3661]

Scaling matters. This design could never scale to millions of users. I'll be honest, someone needs to sit him down and explain to him where we are in the Information Age. This is like using Alchemy principals in Modern Chemistry.

Re:Interesting person

[bobbied]

You are not following the logic I'm presenting.

Who's the MOST intolerant? is perhaps the best question to ask...

I'm saying that the person who attempts to force someone else to violate their religious views, through intimidation, force of law or otherwise to comply with their wishes is being the most intolerant, especially when it's easy to find another way. Just walk up the street or ask your smartphone for another baker and pizzeria that WILL serve you and use them instead. How hard is that?

Refusing to deliver food for the reception isn't forcing the couple to not get married and only makes them take their business elsewhere. Nobody's religious views get violated and the couple can still get their cake and pizza, just go someplace else...

I say, be tolerant, walk out of the business refusing to serve you and into one that will and just forget about it. No need to be rude, no need to get mad, no need to sue or get offended by people with stupid views... Because as Slashdot so aptly proves, stupid and disagreeable people are everywhere and letting yourself get upset by them is pointless.

Re:Interesting person

[swb]

I think the entire homoesexual marriage "debate" is a fraud.

For all intents and purposes, "marriage" is merely a state-sponsored package of legal rights and obligations. Why shouldn't homoesexuals get married? But then again, I feel the same way about plural marriages. If 3+ people want to be married, who says they shouldn't?

That being said, I've always been surprised that homoesexuals WANT to get married. I had always figured that the last thing they would want to do is buy into the patriarchal and religiously grounded structure of marriage. Sure, they can live their marriage any way they choose but the legal package they buy into is a bit of a Pandora's box and I think there's a lot more baggage with "being married" than they assume. Some smart lawyers out there are going to get filthy rich in about 5 years when they're able to corner the market on homoesexual divorce.

I'm also inclined to think that homoesexuals sort of want to have it both ways (no pun intended). I think on one hand they want to be "just like everyone else" but at the same time want to posit themselves as being "different" in ways other than how and with whom they use their genitalia to achieve orgasm. Perhaps older homoesexuals have some kind hard-earned wisdom that comes from living life on the margins, but then again, so does a wino. I can't escape this notion that homoesexuals have sold (and many non-homoesexuals have bought into) an idea that there's something uniquely different about being homoesexual other than just their sexuality and that it's somehow special, too. Bullshit. Ideas are ideas, their merits should be judged on their merits, not given any special consideration because they come from someone with a specific sexual inkling.

I'm less sold on the newest iteration of this, transgenderism. I think there's a significant but minority percentage of people broadly labeled as "transgender" who really are transgender, actual neurobiological condition. I think a much larger percentage are just people with marginalized sexual proclivities hopping on the bandwagon, hoping that they, too, will gain the special aura that homoesexuals have largely obtained in the non-troglodyte part of the population. I also think that a small but not totally insignificant portion of the people claiming transgender status aren't, whether it's full blown mental illness or just a package of neuroses.

I also think there's a lot of conceptual problems to transgenderism. I'm thoroughly confused by the notion of, say, lesbians who glom onto transgenderism as the rationale for why they want to dress, look and act like men. Doesn't that kind of make you a heterosexual? There was even a NY Times article about some women's college having an existential crisis about a lesbian student going through gender reassignment asking if he/she should still be allowed at an all-women's college. I don't quite get the logic of how you can be woman, who's a man, but who wants to identify as a lesbian.

It's this kind of weird non-logic that makes me think these people really aren't "transgender" in the sense of having some kind of other-gender neurological affiliation, but are instead people that suffer from some kind of mental illness. "I'm a woman that likes women but I want to become a man who identifies as a woman who likes women" -- whys should I take that any more seriously than the guy who claims he's Napoleon?

Re:Interesting person

[PopeRatzo]

Who's the MOST intolerant? is perhaps the best question to ask...

Why "MOST" and not "FIRST"?

When a gay couple walk into a bakery and ask to order a cake and are told, "we don't bake cakes for your kind", what is the INITIAL act of intolerance? Who threw the first stone? I mean, it's been a while since my bibling days, but isn't there something in there about "throwing the first stone"?

Re:Interesting person

[PopeRatzo]

y understanding is that it's some form of tourette's rather than actual racism.

If we're referencing his participation in online forums, I'm not sure that there is any such thing as typed Tourette's.

Re:Interesting person

[butchersong]

So you would support say destroying the business of a black family because they didn't want to cater a white pride event?

Re:Interesting person

[aaronb1138]

Except that alchemy works if you bump over from chemistry to nuclear physics. It's trivial to turn lead into gold, but energetically unfavorable (what you are saying with scalability) and lots of nasty radiation.

It's clearly not an OS designed for millions of users. It's meant for tinkerers who want to run one application at a time because they know they are more productive that way. George R. R. Martin uses an old DOS box with Wordstar for exactly this reason.

Multitasking may let a person do more stuff, but for the majority of people, it results in less total stuff getting done.

holy holy holy

[Rich_Lather]

Will this operating system be completely free of daemons?

Re:holy holy holy

[belrick]

They are called "angels", thank you very much.

Before you comment saying he's a racist asshole

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep in mind this guy has schizophrenia, the word salads and bursts of inappropriate language are literally part of his illness, so try to focus on his technical achievements rather than take offence to his language.

Re:Before you comment saying he's a racist asshole

[Maritz]

The barriers that keep you from expressing your racism are working well, but you might need a few extra 'barriers' to get the full complement.

Re:Before you comment saying he's a racist asshole

[OverlordQ]

> so try to focus on his technical achievements

Like thinking memory protection is pointless?

Re:Before you comment saying he's a racist asshole

[omnichad]

Since only AC's have responded so far, do you know what schizophrenia is?

Hint: it's not Dissociative Identity Disorder.

Origins

[Anonymous Coward]

- Prof told me to write an OS and I wrote Linux.

- God told me to write an OS and I wrote TempleOS.

- Devil told me to write an OS and I wrote Windows.

Hmm...

[EmeraldBot]

TempleOS has always struck me very similar to the ancient LISP machines, the ones that everyone loves so much. It's such a shame that the OS will forever be held back by its author, as well as some of its more practical limitations (*cough* no sound support *cough*), because it has some very good ideas. It particular, the indexing and documentation system are just overall fantastic; Java is widely lauded for its excellent documentation features, but it doesn't have anything compared to this. The shell is another really awesome idea; a multimedia shell is something that I've actually never considered, to be totally honest, it never crossed my mind. Imagine a shell you could just live in; one in which you could browse your system, listen to music, do your email, etc. all without ever having to leave your coding environment. I know emacs exists, but it's not quite on this level - I wish other operating systems like FreeBSD or Linux had an equivalent.

Re:Hmm...

[adolf]

The shell is another really awesome idea; a multimedia shell is something that I've actually never considered, to be totally honest, it never crossed my mind. Imagine a shell you could just live in; one in which you could browse your system, listen to music, do your email, etc. all without ever having to leave your coding environment. I know emacs exists, but it's not quite on this level - I wish other operating systems like FreeBSD or Linux had an equivalent.

Sounds a lot like how I used bash twenty years ago, before I had a machine that wouldn't fall down trying to run X.

Re:Hmm...

[Rinikusu]

Take a look at Terminology, then. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Didn't we do this already?

[gstoddart]

Or is this a different bit of publicity than this?

Is this to be a semi-annual thing?

"blurs the lines between programs and documents"

[tlambert]

"blurs the lines between programs and documents"

Yeah. So do Word macro viruses and Outlook email exploits.

Re:"blurs the lines between programs and documents

[pigiron]

LISP 1.5 too!

Unified Hypertext is impressive (among others)

[CrashNBrn]

I saw TempleOS on BetaNews -- at least 5 years ago now. Never had the time nor inclination to see what it was all about, as it looked just a little bit too Old-School (the EGA/VGA 16 color). This "technical look" is actually pretty interesting, especially the way the system is built on and uses hyperlinks, the file format is described as

HTML, JSON, XML, shell scripts, source files, text files – TempleOS replaces all of these via one unified hypertext representation.

Maybe the WhatWG or W3C could learn a thing or three.

Ouch

[Anonymous Coward]

Relevant quote from article, stating that everything in TempleOS runs in ring 0, has no concept of users or permissions:

He [Terry] argues that Linux is designed for a use case that most people don’t have. Linux, he says, aims to be a 1970s mainframe, with 100 users connected at once. If a crash in one users’ programs could take down all the others, then obviously that would be bad. But for a personal computer, with just one user, this makes no sense. Instead the OS should empower the single user and not get in their way.

It's a good thing TempleOS has no network drivers because the system would be laughably insecure on any network.

Nice article

[juanfgs]

It's really interesting how people jump in the bandwagon of bashing this because of it's author. But this article really points out things that I wanted to see but I missed from running templeOS, which are the interesting part that it's author created.

It's wonderful to see how when freeing a developer of current constraints of accepted programming practices it can come up with crazy but interesting and admittedly cool ideas.

The DolDoc was particularly interesting for me, mostly in a world where we have HTML everywhere plugged to a VM, DolDoc seems like a different approach (which I'm sure has plenty of flaws) to be considered at least as food for thought for future solutions.

And last but not least, I really respect someone who can do this kind of stuff. Even if I may not agree with his ideas, I'm glad that he spends time in actually creating stuff which is more that I can say about a lot of people.

Ow. Was not aware...

[vikingpower]

of how ill this guy actually is. Poor bugger.

Twice conversion to the other side

[krkhan]

Interestingly, the man claimed to be an atheist at some point.

He’d grown up Catholic, but later embraced atheism. "I thought the brain was a computer," Davis says, "And so I had no need for a soul." He saw himself as a scientific materialist; he believes that metaphor—the brain as a computer—has done more to increase the number of atheists than anything by Darwin. He still considers himself scientifically minded. "Today I find the people most similar to me are atheist-scientist people," he says. "The difference is God has talked to me, so I'm basically like an atheist who God has talked to."