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Creator of TempleOS, Terry Davis, Has Passed Away (osnews.com)
OSNews reports:
Terrence Andrew Davis, sole creator and developer of TempleOS (née LoseThos), has passed away at age 48. Davis suffered from mental illness -- schizophrenia -- which had a severe impact on his life. He claimed he created his operating system after having spoken with and receiving instructions from god, and he was a controversial figure, also here on OSNews, for his incomprehensible rants and abrasive style towards OSNews readers and staff. We eventually had to ban him, but our then-editor Kroc Kamen worked with him in 2010 to publish an article about his operating system despite his ban.... I hope he found peace -- wherever he may be.
Davis spent 10 years building "an operating system to talk to God," according to a 2014 profile in Motherboard, which described its welcome screen as "a riot of 16-color, scrolling, blinking text" resembling early DOS-based GUIs. (Wikipedia describes its interface as "a mixture of DOS and Turbo C.") To build his operating system, Terry wrote 121,176 lines of code.
An anonymous reader writes: Davis learned assembly language on a Commodore 64 before he'd graduated from high school. He eventually got a master's degree in electrical engineering from Arizona State University, and as an undergrad he worked briefly at Ticketmaster, programming operating systems. His later life included time in mental hospitals and some homelessness, as well as living at home with his parents after his schizophrenia was diagnosed and treated.
In 2014 Motherboard pieced together his lifestyle from emailed updates Terry sent from his Ubuntu desktop. They concluded he was living on disability, and spent most of his time coding, surfing the web, "or using the output from the National Institute of Standards and Technology randomness beacon to talk to God -- he posts the results on his webpage as 'Terry Davis' Rants.'" Their article describes him as "God's lonely programmer," saying Davis "offered the world a temple to a God who speaks only to him, and is still waiting for everyone else to listen."
Terry's death was confirmed by a local Oregon newspaper, and the official web site for TempleOS now also includes this death notice:
In the wake of Terry A. Davis' passing his family has requested supporters of his donate to "organizations working to ease the pain and suffering caused by mental illness" such as
Davis spent 10 years building "an operating system to talk to God," according to a 2014 profile in Motherboard, which described its welcome screen as "a riot of 16-color, scrolling, blinking text" resembling early DOS-based GUIs. (Wikipedia describes its interface as "a mixture of DOS and Turbo C.") To build his operating system, Terry wrote 121,176 lines of code.
An anonymous reader writes: Davis learned assembly language on a Commodore 64 before he'd graduated from high school. He eventually got a master's degree in electrical engineering from Arizona State University, and as an undergrad he worked briefly at Ticketmaster, programming operating systems. His later life included time in mental hospitals and some homelessness, as well as living at home with his parents after his schizophrenia was diagnosed and treated.
In 2014 Motherboard pieced together his lifestyle from emailed updates Terry sent from his Ubuntu desktop. They concluded he was living on disability, and spent most of his time coding, surfing the web, "or using the output from the National Institute of Standards and Technology randomness beacon to talk to God -- he posts the results on his webpage as 'Terry Davis' Rants.'" Their article describes him as "God's lonely programmer," saying Davis "offered the world a temple to a God who speaks only to him, and is still waiting for everyone else to listen."
Terry's death was confirmed by a local Oregon newspaper, and the official web site for TempleOS now also includes this death notice:
In the wake of Terry A. Davis' passing his family has requested supporters of his donate to "organizations working to ease the pain and suffering caused by mental illness" such as
That's French for "born", and specifically the female form. Why would you write that? That's to indicate the maiden name of a person, or more rarely when a pseudonym is used.... I don't think a OS is birthed.
And what "os"? And talking to what?
Coding is coitus and compilation is gestation. Your final executable is then ejected. Whether it is alive, stillborn or bad code is a different matter.
I liked the idea of having a system compiler fast enough to serve as a JIT-scripting engine. We're so used to stupidly slow compilers that this is actually innovative even though Terry's take was far from the first. EG. Turbo Pascal is one earlier example of a compiler fast enough to do that, even though it misses the necessary tooling. Of course this approach has drawbacks. But even if one wouldn't want to use it, there's nothing wrong with looking at the ideas the OS is built upon.
Otherwise, the guy was completely mad and thereby a useful example to whom one might compare the current target of a good dressing down unfavourably. RIP Terry, for lord knows the guy needed the peace.
Because people stop treating ill people like ill people, as soon as that illness contains some not nice behavior. Even if it clearly is caused by the illness.
And so they ice him out and stop giving him the help he needs, until he dies.
Even though that dynamic is understandable, in my book, it is denial of assistance. A crime nearly as great as doing the killing oneself.
Religious people, from suicide bombers in the middle east to child rapists in the Vatican to the average superstitious schizophrenic like this guy, need treatment! Not even more hate. Hate is what caused their illness to begin with.
But hey... we're the kind of people who murder murderers, and then act surprised if other people learn form us, that murder is all-right, if you got an excuse the public thinks is valid. Ditto for hate, torture, etc.
We're still in the deepest depths of the dark ages. At least, until the ravaging religious epidemics are cured (without hurting even a single person), and we can cure and re-integrate even mass-murdering child rapists. Or even ... *gasp* ... prevent them from becoming that way.
I mean the idea of acting that way, is the fundament of pretty much every religion I know of. For a reason.
Iâ(TM)m not anywhere near my laptop so I canâ(TM)t load it into a VM, so for now I just want to ask if any of you have tried loading it up and what your experience was? I see itâ(TM)s only 16MB, so Iâ(TM)m guessing it wasnâ(TM)t all that far along or perhaps talking to god can be done efficiently. Anybody?
Paul Lenhart writes words!
He admitted to a lot of strange stuff and I wonder whether he was trying to keep the CIA confused or make it so they had nothing to hold over him.
Never Hurd of this operating system, but it could open Windows to the mind of this individual who has made himself like the Unix of yore working practically NonStop on this GEM.
He is just looking for a new way to talk to his imaginary god
If I remember correctly, his OS was written completely from scratch and had a few interesting ideas:
1) All code is compiled JIT, this means that C looks just like a scripting language and you can always break into a debugger.
2) He made his own dialect of C called HolyC, which was a version of C with small fixes to make it more low-level and accurate.
3) If I remember correctly symbol tables were global, so that processes could access each other's variables by names, thus allowing libraries to simply work by changing global variables.
I am sure that somewhere, in his code, there's something to learn from.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Not the visuals of the UI. But the elegance of the system, and the love that has gone into it.
Besides, with our bling obsessed software ecosystem, we could give it a bling-you-to-death UI in a few days, if we wanted. (And a few more, to make the GUI not cripple the power of what was there before.)
I never heard of it, or him, but now it will definitely be an inspiration for my own OS project. Minus the religious aka schizophrenic part. Plus the passion part.
if he wouldnt had gone and said God made him do it, OS would had more credit, some cool innovated stuff was included.
While there are many problems with religion, I wonder if modern secularism really offers anything better. Sure, these idiots believe in god, but we believe in 60 genders and in infinite growth. They burn innocent women and rape children, but we cause global warming that will kill much more people in the end, not to mention all the shit we enabled in africa and china just to get cheaper products. They repsect community and friendships, while we... sit alone behind our screen, drenching ourselves in consumerism and pills, trying to forget.
Are you sure that the secular west managed to do something better? Hell, even Newton and Einstein were partially religious, and not rabid hateful atheists.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
He died because the glow in the dark CIA naggers got to him.
According to wikipedia:
On the evening of 11th of August 2018, Terry was walking alongside some railroad tracks in the city of The Dalles, when he was accidentally struck by a Union Pacific train coming from behind.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
The schizophrenia part will disappear and the mere associations with a god will persist.
I did check on wikipedia, and they say he maximum sentence is "21 years (can be extended indefinitely if the criminal poses a danger to society at the end of served time); 30 years for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity" which isn't too different than some countries with a nominal life sentence.
Very close to France which has "life but you can get out in 22 years" and "life but you can get out in 30 years" just the 'paroling' decision is flipped around : show the man is dangerous vs show the man is not dangerous.
At one point on the path of understanding schizophrenia, one reaches reach your current view. I was there too. I also thought I knew it very well, and that it "simply" was not understandable or predictable.
But it's one of those things, where if you think even further (*much further*), you end up very close to this apparently simplistic view again.
The fact that it is hard to predict and non-obvious to you, should tell you that you are far from having understood it. Doesn't mean others haven't.
I have gone so far, I know schizophrenia better than even current research. Actually, I know how to cure schizophrenia. The reason we don't, is that under normal circumstances (as in: without safe plasticity-altering drugs), it takes forever, and you basically need to use up somebody else's life to save this one. You just can't create neural input, strong enough, to overcome the weakness of the connections to those encapsulations.
Trust me, I tried. My mom was schizophrenic.
So don't worry. I not only know what you say, but am far past it.
I understand how it can look clueless to a clueless person that thinks she has a bit of a clue. (Just enough to bully others with snobism.)
Especially with me simplifying things to suit the average reader here.
Yes. And? There are still many things that we treat wrongly, to cause such people to exist. And we even still hate them. Isn't it convenient, to ignore everything else that I said to make the argument complete, and then pick on your straw man?
We used to prank call Terry Davis sometimes, he used to have some good insights and he could carry on a conversation for a while until he would suddenly "switch gears" and hang up the phone. One time, we even had him and Richard Stallman speak to eachother for a moment.
And he thought Linus Torvalds was a noob because he never wrote his own compiler.
NEO layout is Germany's Dvorak, but much better, and much more powerful.
Doesn't mean everyone who's not using ASCII like an American (and ONLY an American) from the 80s is an iTard.
Why you would defend a site, whose operators are so debilitatingly incompetent, that they can't even implement UTF-8 with a code block / code point whitelist, like every sane person since the early 2000s, is a riddle to me.
Do you know the cause of death because I'm not seeing it. For all we know, he died of a heart attack
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I'm sure he would appreciate this comment - he truly hated n1ggers!
I followed him from time to time. Some of his rants during his schizophrenic periods were weird, to say the least. Then again, not many people develop a programming language on their own and then use it to program a complete graphical operating system that runs on bare metal with it. It's sad that his schizophrenia wasn't treated earlier and more effectively.
They glow in the Dark
F
At the time terry was wondering around in 'murica, 'murica didn't have time to take care of Terries, they focused on dreamers, blacks, feminists, gays and hilary.
A guy has thousands of people documenting his condition, reporting in where he is(which he did also by himself), and so on... yet the public services never gave a shit.
when did 'murica stopped caring about Americans?
1. Religion is schizophrenia. It is not about "believing in God". It is about ignoring outside reality, in favor of a comforting inner delusion. E.g. because reality is unbearable. "God" is merely one example of an alter ego of such people. They aren't idiots because of that. My mom wasn't an idiot. She was a genius. Discovered helicobacter pylory and its effects on babies, a decade before somebody got the Nobel prize for it. ... They are just ill. Gravely ill. ... She was ill. And she was laughed out by the professors because of this. Despite her hypothesis being shown to be correct later. ... She just needed the delusion, to handle certain youth traumata that go back several generations, all the way to World War 1. ... Because we are still too incompetent to fix this illness.
2. What does secularity have to do with p.c. SJWs? Did you realize, you said "BELIEVE" when talking about those ridiculous "60 genders" and "infinite growth"? The whole damn point of sanity (that't the word for what you call atheism, if you need one), is that you don't believe. Period. You observe, you notice patterns, you conclude, and you act on that. That does not even oppose the concept of a "God". It just highlights that there is no use in assuming the existence of something, that you literally can't tell exists.
Not do "we" cause global warming and religious people somehow don't.
So take your straw man and typical American false dichotomy of "us vs them", and shove them up your lower back mouth.
The assholes you are talking about, who ruin the planet and harm people, are profit psychopaths by the way. That's a different illness, and mostly the result of overpopulation giving a natural advantage to psychopaths. (I haven't found out why people believe that profit and growth for the sake of profit and growth are good things though.)
Also, ... mass-murdering hateful suicide-bombing child-raping discriminating religious people who hate everything foreign or not obeying their schizophrenia "respect community and friendships" too? And again, you seem to confuse "we" with your psychopathic dog-eat-dog society of assholes that is the cornerstone of "the economy".
I'm sorry that you are alone, and have to drench yourself in consumerism and pills, because you feel forced to reject community and friendships and being an asshole to others. I really do.
Most of the world is not like this. "Our" western culture only is. (Which includes the east-Asian and third world countries that we infected with it.)
Just take all your money of your next salary, don't pay any bills, buy a plane ticket, and move out. To a culture that never was influenced by western culture.
You will be much happier.
Newton and Einstein weren't religious. They were grown into a culture of oppressive religious conditioning. They acted and said what was expected of them at the time, so they wouldn't get harassed and hated and maybe even murdered by Catholibans / people like you.
Do you even think before you write?
Please take your Asperger's pills. And buy yourself some common sense. Yours seems to be completely gone.
NEO layout is Germany's Dvorak, but much better, and much more powerful.
Doesn't mean everyone who's not using ASCII like an American (and ONLY an American) from the 80s is an iTard.
Why you would defend a site, whose operators are so debilitatingly incompetent, that they can't even implement UTF-8 with a code block / code point whitelist, like every sane person since the early 2000s, is a riddle to me.
Found the German iTard.
He didn't "pass away". He *died* due to negligence
How do you know what he died of?
According to Wikipedia, he hit by a train in an accident.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Rest In Peace, Terry.
RTFA please.
That OS seems to be dedicated to Satan...
From local news reports he was walking on rail tracks and got struck by train coming up behind him.
iirc, mental health centers were cut back significantly under Reagan and no one's bothered to do much about it since then. that's one possible answer, though i'd say that a more accurate answer would be that we never really did.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
to elaborate slightly, i don't know how great those mental health centers were on average even when they did exist. there have certainly been horror stories; i just don't know whether they are representative. it's quite possible that they were just places to send humans to rot like garbage out of sight, and we decided not to waste the money on that since they could rot on the street just as well. i don't know.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
I see a lot of claims of knowledge, even a claim that it's all simple, but no actual explanation.
As to my experience, that's second hand with several (late and living) family members in appropriate medical professions, and I'm quite sure there's no hate in the business. Occasional exasperation or annoyance maybe, but no hate.
Religion is not the root of all evil
Sure it is. Before religion, was there even a concept of 'evil'? I bet you that religion was what invented the concept of evil when creation myths were being concocted ten thousand years ago.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Notably, the UI, shell, document format, organization structure, and IDE are all one and the same. Your shell is a text editor where you can embed drawings and link them to other documents, and your documents can be compiled and run with a built-in JIT compiler that also provides its own debug environment.
This, not surprisingly, sounds Commodore 64-ish. For the younger folks, if you turn on a Commodore 64, within 3 seconds you have an OS prompt. From that prompt, you can interact with the OS via commands, including directly viewing/editing contents of registers and memory. You can interact with disk drives, or any other hardware connected to the machine, for that matter. And you can load and execute (and even edit certain) applications. Or, you can just start typing/adding BASIC language lines to the built-in BASIC interpreter. It's not a bad paradigm to mimic, really.
He's running over glow in the darks forever now. He hit them with his car, they hit him with a train.
Schizophrenia is unlikely to be even one disease, and may be a set of common or overlapping symptoms for something like seven separate illnesses. Debate and research continues.
Assassinated by CIAN*ggers!
Schizophrenia is unlikely to be even one disease, and may be a set of common or overlapping symptoms for something like seven separate illnesses. Debate and research continues.
A good point to reiterate- many such things are actually categorizations/classifications based on observation. Almost everybody goes through periods of time when they are very excited and/or excited for relatively long duration, as well as very sad and/or sad for relatively long duration. If in the context of their lives, they achieve general kinds of success/functioning, then they are classified as 'normal'. If in the context of their lives, they struggle and find themselves overly stressed for prolonged periods of time, they are considered "bipolar". While no doubt there are a significant fraction of those cases that are caused by underlying biology, I suspect that the vast majority of those cases would disappear if those people woke up and won the lottery (and thus removed the lion's share of stress from their lives). I find it interesting to call something a disease that can be cured by winning the lottery. But it's the way of our world.
I also tend to suspect that it's pretty easy for people who have won the lottery, to use legal means most can't afford to induce bipolar/schizophrenia in their political enemies. But I guess most psychiatrists would assert that such a suspicion is enough justification to write a scrip for antipsychotics. Slavery used to be legal and widespread. Odds are a hundred years from now psychiatrists will be much better at their jobs.
This is exactly the type of personality that is a perfect fit for one of the *BSD teams.
The reason that he wrote an OS from scratch and you never will is because he was inspired by the God you don't believe in.
This article provides some links to places suggested to donate to, to ease the pain of mental illness. I would just like to share a short story.
I attended a public NAMI support group a while ago. Part of the group were these handouts that would explain various mental illnesses. Eventually one of the hand-outs attempted to explain shizophrenia. I shit you not; in this hand out, schizophrenia was described as a physical attack on the brain. They showed pictures of, 'healthy brains', and then of, 'schizophrenic' brains. The schizophrenic brains were smaller. This literal shrinkage of the brain was described as a symptom of schizophrenia's physical effects on the brain.
I remember upon reading this, I thought to myself, "bulllllll... shit". I thought to myself, the brains of these schizophrenics aren't shrinking because of the disease, they are shrinking because of the anti-psychotics they are being, "medicated with".
Fast forward about 5 years later, and I came across a study proving to at least some degree my, hunch, at this, "NAMI", meeting. Schizophrenia is not a disease that manifests itself physically by literally shrinking the brain (brain atrophy); it is a description of an observation on human behavior and the medication often prescribed to treat it, is really nothing more than a tranquilizer that after long enough repeated use causes brain atrophy. It's my belief that because these, 'anti-psychotics', essentially stop a lot of synaptic firing, that some neurons, after being drugged up for so long, just stop functioning and die off, or perhaps, that if prescribed at young enough ages, stops later adult brain development.
Anyway, theorizing aside. My point is that NAMI was (and probably still is along with many NPs and Psychiatrists) in the dark at least on this subject, and probably is on many others. I can not describe the level of frustration I felt being taught that schizophrenia is shrinking the brains of it's sufferers, when in fact, it is the, 'medication', they are being given that is doing the physical damage.
So my real point is that if you want to donate money to causes aimed at helping to alleviate suffering from mental-illness, i would not suggest sending money to NAMI. Do I think NAMI is evil? No. I think they are grossly ignorant and misguided along with many people in the mental health system from Psychiatrists all the way down to patients. I think people begin to identify more with their diagnosis, than who they actually are as a person, as a personality. And likewise can be objectified as a described set of behavioral patterns, rather than a person. I think the mental-health system claims to want help these people by having others see them, 'differently'. From one perspective, this is an attempt at trying to breed compassion from those who would other wise most likely just be viewed as, 'difficult people'. The problem is, most people in the mental health system also view people as, 'difficult'. To people inside and outside the mental health system you become some one who is, having a manic episode, depressed, anxious, delusional, hullucinatory, etc.. etc..
I'm not preaching full blow anti-psychiatry here, so much as I'm trying to say that the mental health field, as i've often seen it and experienced it is, very often much like one of those cartoons where one character is digging a hole and throwing the dirt in back of him, while some one behind him is digging their own hole and throwing their dirt over their back. Each person is sort of stuck, never getting anywhere, because they keep filling up each other's hole.
Everybody becomes a fucking doctor and normal human interaction becomes, instead, this sociopathic behavioral observer. There are people in the field, who are sort of hip to the jive, and are trying to help; but, it's sort of like if you are working for a logging company, trying to plant a few trees as you cut down large oaks.
TempleOS is a fascinating project. It is completely different from everything we currently have, and in some interesting ways.
Notably, the UI, shell, document format, organization structure, and IDE are all one and the same. Your shell is a text editor where you can embed drawings and link them to other documents, and your documents can be compiled and run with a built-in JIT compiler that also provides its own debug environment.
It's the opposite paradigm to the Unix "everything is a string" philosophy, and also antithetical to Windows' notion of "everything is a GUI". It's more "everything is connected".
Oh you mean like Genera?
All the others you name are fully in board for better health services.
It is the social Darwinist conservatives who donâ(TM)t want the mentally ill to get too comfortable.
Hit by a train usually means suicide by standing in front of a train.
There's a fine line between genius and insanity.
Apparently Kanye West believes his schizophrenia is what causes him to be creative. If you cure it, do you also neuter the creative drive?
How did this bigoted shit get marked as insightful?
Mental health services were cut back in the 80s and everyone suffered. Minorities with mental health issues got screwed just as much as white people with mental health issues.
I ran a copy up in a virtual machine and it worked without an issue. I went through some of the programs and tried to get used to the cli it uses IIRC. One of my colleagues gave it a go as well a few weeks ago.
I might go back and look at it again, you never know what jewels lie in there from such dedicated creation.
R.I.P Terry, thank you for something interesting.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Negative. The ACLU sued to have the asylums shut down on the basis that incarcerating people who committed no crime was immoral. They won. Reagan closed the doors on the now-empty facilities. And somehow got the blame for setting people free who were innocent. As long as they could lift spoon to mouth to feed themselves, they were good to go according to the ACLU.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
One guy carries generations of taxes on his back, can't have even the basic health care for his condition and is treated like a criminal,
vs some random person jumping from country to country and ending up in the one that offers him the best conditions.
Terry didn't do country-shopping. He stayed home, yet he lived like an exiled.
If you want to call it bigotry, call it that way, if you want to call me racist, please do... I am. /g/ and /pol/.
This doesn't negate the fact that nobody fucking cared about terry, because terry didn't align with the mentality the media and the leftists try to create. That's why he was living in a van and later on in the streets, he had his benefits denied and lived off of donations mainly from people who visited reddit and
Your fellow citizen dies like a dog in the streets and your are taking care of leeches.
Reagan closed them instead of reforming them because the goal was to abandon the insane for monetary reasons, and certainly not for the purpose of helping anyone but the wealthy.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If someone that you loved has ever succumbed to a mental illness, you would realize how incredibly difficult it can be to get them help.
1 - They don't think they are ill & they refuse treatment
2 - if they are not an immediate threat to themselves or to others, goto line 1
yet the public services never gave a shit.
The summary stated that he was living on disability, which I'm assuming is funded from Social Security.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Courts have established that you can't just lock someone away in a mental institution against their will. Legally, one can only be institutionalized if they are reasonably considered an immediate threat to themselves or others. This precedent is established because the cops have abused the mental health system to lock away dissidents, troublemakers, and etc. who were really not ill.
All major cities have mental health services available. If he wanted to check in he could have.
...
I think Terry Devis can be called Henry Darger of programming - iconic outsider person who devoted big part of his life to creating something big, but still naive, creation.
Amazing achievement, some people chose to be a alcoholic a druggy or all manor of other vises, noone chooses to be schizophrenic. Given the hand he was dealt, I think it is outstanding what he has achieved.
I'm thinking he hit a small animal cat rabbit raccoon with glowing eyes (light reflection).
If I could vote, I'd say we should strip off the eighth bit on all char data posted to the site.\
Whatever, gramps.
"dreamers, blacks, feminists, gays" are all groups of people in America. Addressing discrimination against multiple groups does not require ignoring the needs of other groups. On the contrary; improving equality for marginalized groups will make more resources available to help everyone, including people like Terry.
interesting. since this is a political topic, i'll have to ask for references.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Your mom's potting shed has to be kinda cramped, you punk.