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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.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they hate it when you do that.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
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.
IÃ(TM)t won'IÃ(TM)t run on your iGadgeIÃ(TM)t
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
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
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
I liked the idea of having a system compiler fast enough to serve as a JIT-scripting engine.
Then you most certainly like Oberon.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
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.
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?
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".
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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.