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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

holy holy holy

[Rich_Lather]

Will this operating system be completely free of daemons?

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.

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.

"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.