One thing that stands out to me is that... TempleOS could have been even MORE complex, but the author, for reasons he can best express, decided to limit himself to 256 color VGA, no networking (if memory serves). It really serves as an inspiration to not give up when people tell you “it’s too much work”.
That's interesting to me because even seen as a pure negative, circumcision was originally a minor trade-off in a covenant wherein God agreed to make Abraham a "father of nations." And here, essentially, Terry makes a little graphics sacrifice and, according to Terry, gets help from God himself in building the rest of this remarkable TempleOS. Seen from that perspective it makes the graphics seem like a minor deal.
This will probably cause the downvotes to rain down, but to continue the Abraham analogy, who knows what Terry's work will go on to influence in the future; maybe Terry becomes a "father" in a long chain of Temple-influenced OS projects.
I think you're right there. TempleOS is full of Bible metaphors - the root task is Adam, HolyC is a pun, etc. The circumcision metaphor fits.
..I wonder how much more of Terry's seemingly nonsensical musings are actually lucid metaphors. The man needed a translator (or the "holy spirit", metaphorically speaking)
I guess this in response to the passing / maybe passing of it's author, Terry Davis. It's still not fully clear to me if that's a rumor or if it's real.
Regardless, it's clear that Terry is both a tremendously talented and deeply troubled person. But, his personal troubles have nothing to do with the technical merits of what he created - it's impressive, to say the least. These accomplishments, however, don't in any way excuse his egregious behavior. He's a complicated figure.
It's better if you get out in front of it before someone with no knowledge of Terry's history comes in guns blazing with accusations that Terry is a mega racist evil person.
It is his project. It's his legacy. I don't see how you can separate him from what he created - I never got the feeling that he wanted anyone to - so why should we? History is what it is - let's recognize that and look at the good with the bad.
Easy to separate. You dont think about a singer's private life doing drugs to be able to enjoy their music. Why is it different here? And if you only follow folks who have never said anything wrong in their whole life, well you cant do much anymore can you? Because true saints are rare to come by.
Can we separate the cause for what drove him to do that from what caused his other, less acceptable, behavior? There's been a lot of looking purely at the technical merits of stuff in the past few decades, with quite little attention paid to the causes or effects of the technology in question, to my mind. I'm not sure it's left us in a particularly good position.
> Terry is tremendously talented... these accomplishments, however, don't in any way excuse his egregious behavior. He's a complicated figure.
A bit of a stretch, but your comment is on par with saying: Stephen Hawking was a tremendously smart person... his accomplishments, however, don't in anyway excuse his lack of physical productivity.
The point I am trying to illustrate is that the behavior most people, perhaps rightfully so, find egregious, is the best effort possible for people with schizophrenia. Having expectation for any kind of excuse, beyond the neurological condition, I believe is being a little short with compassion.
The Stephen Hawking comparison is way off. His condition effected just himself. Terry Davis said some pretty terrible things aimed at actual people. He tried to hurt real people - Hawking didn't. That is a factual statement.
Im sure he did the best he could. Mental illness is a terrible thing. as a society, we do a terrible job in dealing with it. But, we can't just pretend like racist comments werent made. They were. They are part of his legacy.
TempleOs is part of his legacy too. It's his project - no one else's. It will always be tied to him. To pretend like he didn't behave the way that he did would be the same as pretending he didn't suffer from his illness. It's an impressive legacy. It's a tragic one. It's an appalling one. But, it's who he is. Whitewashing his mental problems, would just perpetuate the problems of how we handle such an illness.
> It's an impressive legacy. It's a tragic one. It's an appalling one. But, it's who he is. Whitewashing his mental problems, would just perpetuate the problems of how we handle such an illness.
I think that is the finest summation I've read in any thread about Terry, thank you
Terry's behavior is an unfortunate condition of his mental illness. It is not kind or even considerate to call someone appalling for their mental illness, it is rather, exactly the kind of behavior I would consider appalling from people who are in good headspace.
Okay, it is almost unquestionably certain that as a kid you had to wear nappies and so when you were young, you did the uncomfortable regularly, yet we don't consider it as your legacy or worst yet call it "appalling, and that is what you are", for the very simple reason that you were mentally incapable of comprehending your actions and it's consequences.
It is true that you had to wear nappies but also mind-numbingly stupid to consider it as your legacy or insist that "it is appalling and it is true".
While I understand your point, I do agree with dagenix as well. Not because I think Terry's condition is 'no excuse', but rather because I don't think we can cleanly make a distinction between someone like Terry and the rest of us.
Sure, he more obviously acted in ways that seemed an 'involuntary' result of his condition, but quite frankly much of the horrible shit I see people do or hear people say can be considered 'mental health issues' to various degrees. It's a murky area.
Terry's condition makes it both easier to judge him and excuse his behavior, depending on your perspective. I think getting away from those two extremes is probably the better way to go: be able to openly consider a person's behavior appalling and find understanding this shouldn't be considered an 'appalling person' as a result.
The murky part is all the other stuff. I don't believe that being a diagnosed condition or able to point out a clear neurological cause invalidates all the other stuff that other people struggle with. In many cases we probably just can't diagnose it well enough.
To be clear, I'm not at all arguing that we should have less sympathy or make less room for people like Terry, rather the opposite, and acknowledging that their behavior can be appalling can, in the right context, be a good thing for both them and others.
Perhaps this is not the right context for that argument, but that was what I was trying to say.
Maybe we should stop expecting perfection from public figures. I'm sure there's plenty of dirt I could dig up about you, if I rifled through your past, all your actions and opinions.
I'm really tired of the idea that a hero has to be a perfect saint by modern, vogue definitions. We have a news media that is so rabidly searching for reasons to destroy people, that Musk headbutting a car in frustration is somehow news. So what? Who hasn't banged their head in frustration? Then we have more serious cases, like attacks on Gandhi, where compromising situations with 18-19 year olds (which I'm not defending) get transmuted into accusations of pedophilia.
Can we just stop!? Let good actions be remembered, and let truely bad ones be punished in a timely fashion. By speaking ill of the dead, we rob ourselves of heroes and examples that are genuinely worth following, just because the whole person isn't who we want to be.
I prefer accuracy, and not just for my own benefit. It's a small thing here, but whitewashing uncomfortable past truthful actions rarely leads to a good future outcome.
One could argue that we should let the small stuff go and only hold to this for large infractions, but that just leads to fighting over what is small and what is large, as well as problems where in hindsight something that looked small really wasn't.
Perhaps the way forward is to call out behavior we don't agree with, but also be more accepting of people (as opposed to their behavior) that have portions of their behavior we don't agree with.
why not live by "actions speak louder than words" instead? Everyone says something they end up regretting. With the net whatever you said before ends up tainting your reputation forever. Time to move on to what people do instead.
One thing he did was create a tremendously interesting OS. Another thing he did was to say a bunch of racist stuff. There is no evidence I'm aware of he regretted either. So yes, let's remember _all_ of it.
Saying something is an action. If not, I guess someone like Martin Luther King Jr. did just about nothing with his life. Screaming fire in a crowded theater is also an action. You can't just redefine words.
I agree in general, but the problem with your Musk and Ghandi examples is that they were deified to begin with, we expect more from God's that we would a Car/Rocket company executive or a civil rights activist.
A better example might be sports starts, they are very good at what they do but at some point we decided they had to behave like role models and they often fall short of that expectation. Terry Davis is more like a sports star praising god for his match performance, which isn't out of the ordinary.
I think, for all that Terry has done with TempleOS, I'm sure he could have done a lot lot more if he didn't have his mental health issues holding him back. I really hope that one day if he could get a bit better he could do some really wonderful things. If it is true that he has passed away, that is sad – not just sad in the sense that it is always sad when someone dies, but sad that this possibility would then be forever foreclosed.
But maybe if he didn't have those same issues he would have never started TempleOS in the first place. It takes a certain rejection of reality to even consider writing a complete operating system on your own, and yet he is one of the very very few people that have succeeded at it.
> It takes a certain rejection of reality to even consider writing a complete operating system on your own
This is not true. In fact, it is in some sense an affirmation of the reality that the pieces beneath your high-level software are approachable by mortals and not magic. I used to hack on one just for fun. The difficulty is highly overestimated by some folks here.
There are a lot of topics you could go into very deeply and each of these can turn out to be a huge time sink, and the lack of time is the main reason I stopped. Some of my favorite down-the-rabbit-hole sub-topics were filesystems, synchronization, and message passing for a micro-kernel. Each of these could be someone's full time job but they are approachable.
The more I read about TempleOS, the more fascinated I am. I read articles like this one and have trouble imagining how it can possibly work, but I know that's just my Windows/Unix-centric mindset limiting my thinking.
I should really spark up a VM and try it out. It sounds like some quality time with this would expand my view of how a computing environment can work.
I don't know if I could use this as an everyday OS, but I can see so much good coming from it. Stop thinking about the newest, latest, and greatest. Stop taking control away from the user. These things, and more, we should learn from this project.
>In [this video] Terry gives a brief tour of some of the more interesting features of TempleOS. At 5:50, he shows how to build a small graphical application from scratch.
I'm reading this thing nodding my head all the way down. Clean code practicioners would balk at this but I thought this was cool:
> It's not every IDE that lets you embed images and flowcharts directly into your source code, that kinda makes you sit up and take notice. And yes, those flowchart boxes are hotlinked, so you can click on them to go directly to the source code that implements them.
Also the system-wide native autocomplete is cool. My old Palm Pre had that and it was very handy.
So many cool bits of technology will remain in the shadows of history. So sad.
I think TempleOS migrated most of the interesting parts of the c64 over to the pc quite well and updated as the developer saw fit. Deliberate limitations, eg screen resolution, remove a massive amount of work which is necessary if you’re a lone developer. Priorities are important.
That said, a lack of networking and decent sound support are the missing items I’d add. A web browser would be nice but the layers of complexity required makes that much less feasible. Networked versions of TempleOS would raise a lot of interesting design decisions that are still worth exploring.
I like the thinking behind the shell, the hyperlinking etc and other os are quite backwards in comparison with the integrated approach to the shell. There’s a lot to be gained from grabbing some of these and bringing them into linux etc. Curses could easily be used to do this, or something like Electron or node.js. The thought of all that javascript to do the equivalent... the mind boggles.
These alternative operating systems show that the mainstream doesn’t have all the answers.
I've been following the recent death/hoax of Terry Davis very closely.
As far as I can tell it is so far unconfirmed by any reliable sources. But from what I've gathered it unfortunately seems likely that Terry has passed away. The prominent theory is that he was a victim of an accident involving a train in the Dalles, Oregon.
55 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 75.9 ms ] thread>God said 640x480 16 color was a covenant like circumcision. You can be uncircumcised.
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3mhxc9/templeo...
The glow in the darks man, they're up to something
This will probably cause the downvotes to rain down, but to continue the Abraham analogy, who knows what Terry's work will go on to influence in the future; maybe Terry becomes a "father" in a long chain of Temple-influenced OS projects.
..I wonder how much more of Terry's seemingly nonsensical musings are actually lucid metaphors. The man needed a translator (or the "holy spirit", metaphorically speaking)
Regardless, it's clear that Terry is both a tremendously talented and deeply troubled person. But, his personal troubles have nothing to do with the technical merits of what he created - it's impressive, to say the least. These accomplishments, however, don't in any way excuse his egregious behavior. He's a complicated figure.
Every time TempleOS comes up, someone chimes in with a remark like this. Can't we just focus on the technical aspects?
A bit of a stretch, but your comment is on par with saying: Stephen Hawking was a tremendously smart person... his accomplishments, however, don't in anyway excuse his lack of physical productivity.
The point I am trying to illustrate is that the behavior most people, perhaps rightfully so, find egregious, is the best effort possible for people with schizophrenia. Having expectation for any kind of excuse, beyond the neurological condition, I believe is being a little short with compassion.
Im sure he did the best he could. Mental illness is a terrible thing. as a society, we do a terrible job in dealing with it. But, we can't just pretend like racist comments werent made. They were. They are part of his legacy.
TempleOs is part of his legacy too. It's his project - no one else's. It will always be tied to him. To pretend like he didn't behave the way that he did would be the same as pretending he didn't suffer from his illness. It's an impressive legacy. It's a tragic one. It's an appalling one. But, it's who he is. Whitewashing his mental problems, would just perpetuate the problems of how we handle such an illness.
I think that is the finest summation I've read in any thread about Terry, thank you
Terry's behavior is an unfortunate condition of his mental illness. It is not kind or even considerate to call someone appalling for their mental illness, it is rather, exactly the kind of behavior I would consider appalling from people who are in good headspace.
It is true that you had to wear nappies but also mind-numbingly stupid to consider it as your legacy or insist that "it is appalling and it is true".
Sure, he more obviously acted in ways that seemed an 'involuntary' result of his condition, but quite frankly much of the horrible shit I see people do or hear people say can be considered 'mental health issues' to various degrees. It's a murky area.
Terry's condition makes it both easier to judge him and excuse his behavior, depending on your perspective. I think getting away from those two extremes is probably the better way to go: be able to openly consider a person's behavior appalling and find understanding this shouldn't be considered an 'appalling person' as a result.
To be clear, I'm not at all arguing that we should have less sympathy or make less room for people like Terry, rather the opposite, and acknowledging that their behavior can be appalling can, in the right context, be a good thing for both them and others.
Perhaps this is not the right context for that argument, but that was what I was trying to say.
I'm really tired of the idea that a hero has to be a perfect saint by modern, vogue definitions. We have a news media that is so rabidly searching for reasons to destroy people, that Musk headbutting a car in frustration is somehow news. So what? Who hasn't banged their head in frustration? Then we have more serious cases, like attacks on Gandhi, where compromising situations with 18-19 year olds (which I'm not defending) get transmuted into accusations of pedophilia.
Can we just stop!? Let good actions be remembered, and let truely bad ones be punished in a timely fashion. By speaking ill of the dead, we rob ourselves of heroes and examples that are genuinely worth following, just because the whole person isn't who we want to be.
Edit: transmitted -> transmuted
I prefer accuracy, and not just for my own benefit. It's a small thing here, but whitewashing uncomfortable past truthful actions rarely leads to a good future outcome.
One could argue that we should let the small stuff go and only hold to this for large infractions, but that just leads to fighting over what is small and what is large, as well as problems where in hindsight something that looked small really wasn't.
Perhaps the way forward is to call out behavior we don't agree with, but also be more accepting of people (as opposed to their behavior) that have portions of their behavior we don't agree with.
A better example might be sports starts, they are very good at what they do but at some point we decided they had to behave like role models and they often fall short of that expectation. Terry Davis is more like a sports star praising god for his match performance, which isn't out of the ordinary.
This is not true. In fact, it is in some sense an affirmation of the reality that the pieces beneath your high-level software are approachable by mortals and not magic. I used to hack on one just for fun. The difficulty is highly overestimated by some folks here.
There are a lot of topics you could go into very deeply and each of these can turn out to be a huge time sink, and the lack of time is the main reason I stopped. Some of my favorite down-the-rabbit-hole sub-topics were filesystems, synchronization, and message passing for a micro-kernel. Each of these could be someone's full time job but they are approachable.
Someone else said he wasn't in wy though.
It sadly seems so, but it has not been confirmed.
What is weird is that his site used to have a donations button - https://archive.fo/ltjBH Then someone changed it to suggest donations to charities in honor of his passing - https://archive.fo/M8Iut And now it's completely removed - https://www.templeos.org/
I should really spark up a VM and try it out. It sounds like some quality time with this would expand my view of how a computing environment can work.
Ash to ... And dust to dust.
>In [this video] Terry gives a brief tour of some of the more interesting features of TempleOS. At 5:50, he shows how to build a small graphical application from scratch.
However, I was able to find it here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20170313160408/https://www.youtub...
> It's not every IDE that lets you embed images and flowcharts directly into your source code, that kinda makes you sit up and take notice. And yes, those flowchart boxes are hotlinked, so you can click on them to go directly to the source code that implements them.
Also the system-wide native autocomplete is cool. My old Palm Pre had that and it was very handy.
So many cool bits of technology will remain in the shadows of history. So sad.
I think TempleOS migrated most of the interesting parts of the c64 over to the pc quite well and updated as the developer saw fit. Deliberate limitations, eg screen resolution, remove a massive amount of work which is necessary if you’re a lone developer. Priorities are important.
That said, a lack of networking and decent sound support are the missing items I’d add. A web browser would be nice but the layers of complexity required makes that much less feasible. Networked versions of TempleOS would raise a lot of interesting design decisions that are still worth exploring.
I like the thinking behind the shell, the hyperlinking etc and other os are quite backwards in comparison with the integrated approach to the shell. There’s a lot to be gained from grabbing some of these and bringing them into linux etc. Curses could easily be used to do this, or something like Electron or node.js. The thought of all that javascript to do the equivalent... the mind boggles.
These alternative operating systems show that the mainstream doesn’t have all the answers.
If assembly language doesn’t scare you, have a look at http://menuetos.net/
As far as I can tell it is so far unconfirmed by any reliable sources. But from what I've gathered it unfortunately seems likely that Terry has passed away. The prominent theory is that he was a victim of an accident involving a train in the Dalles, Oregon.
http://www.thedalleschronicle.com/news/2018/jan/03/local-man...
https://i.imgur.com/b1EEp2T.png
This has supposedly been confirmed by family members but everything I've heard is from unscrupulous sources.