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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
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
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.
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.