Terry Davis, a programmer, spent 10 years of his life working on developing an operating system that allows him to talk to God.

"I didn't start working on the operating system thinking of a job for God, but He has shown me the right way and continues to say that this is His Temple."

Terry Davis writes on the official TempleOS (http://www.templeos.org/) website. Crazy, you'll think. In fact, yes, Davis suffers from schizophrenia, a chronic psychosis characterized by the persistence of symptoms of alteration of thought, behavior and affectivity. The term itself comes from Greek and means "split of the mind". The most common symptoms include auditory hallucinations, paranoid delirias and disorganized thoughts or speech. It is accompanied by a significant deficit in social and professional life. Great basics, I would say, for an operating system programmer.  

 

Who is Terry Davis?

"I am the Divine King Terry, the Terrible, of the Holy Roman Catholic Kingdom, AZ / NV."

Terry Davis was born in December 1969, in West Allis, Wisconsin. The son of an industrial engineer, he was the seventh of eight children, but he never had a great relationship with his brothers.

"Jesus did not speak to his brothers, he did not want to have anything to do with them. I'm like him."

In 1980 he began his first computer experiences with an Apple II and then a Commodore 64 which, as we will see, will be the inspiration for his "God Operating System". He studied programming during high school and graduated from Arizona State University with a master's degree in Electrical Engineering in 1994. After graduation, he worked in Tempe, Arizona, as an operating systems programmer, until the company changed his job and moved him on some research projects. Terry doesn't like the new role and decides to quit his job. He was 26 years old, with a degree in engineering, and he wanted to use that knowledge. He had grown up Catholic, but during his studies, induced by his own scientific materialism, he momentarily embraced atheism.

"I thought the brain was a computer, and so I didn't need any soul."

The First Symptoms

During March 1996 the first symptoms of what would become his illness, or his obsession, begin.

"At first I was afraid to talk about it, it seemed a bit like a mental illness, and not a glorious revelation of God. I started seeing people following me with clothes and other stuff. I thought there was something strange."

He begins to believe that he is being stalked by one of his future employers and it upsets him greatly. In his mind he also links the stalking to a parallel project he had worked on and which dealt with computer control systems.

"Today I find that the people most like me are atheist scientists, the difference is that God spoke to me, so I'm basically like an atheist to whom God spoke."

The Escape

Davis is very frightened by these alleged appearances, so much so that he eventually decides to run away and leaves the city, driving south without a clear destination.

"I was listening to the radio and it looked like the radio was talking to me."

He begins to think that the end of the world is near, increasingly gripped by thoughts of conspiracy theories and apocalyptic omens. He abandoned his Honda Accord in Marfa, Texas. He starts dismantling his car in search of a tracking device, until he throws the keys into the Texas desert and starts wandering aimlessly. He is found by the police, who try to get him into the passenger seat, but Davis is frightened and caught up in his conspiracy hypothesis and catapults himself out of the moving car, breaking his collarbone. When he arrives at the hospital, the panic takes over again when he hears doctors talk about "artifacts", while they analyze his X-rays. The whale the idea of having been kidnapped by the aliens and escapes from the hospital, stealing a pickup truck to attempt to escape. He is arrested and, after a series of other strange behaviors, is admitted to a psychiatric hospital. He refuses to eat, thinking that the food may have been poisoned in some way. He even gets to break a window with a chair.

Revelation

Resigned after two weeks, he tries to emulate Jesus by giving away all his possessions. He donates and buys gifts for his brothers' children. He ends up living on the streets.

"In 1996, I decided to give a couple of dollars to charity for the blind. I had been an atheist from 1990 to 1996 and had never given anything to charity. Perhaps that act prompted God to reveal himself to me, and that saved me."

He donated about 10,000 dollars to the Newman Center, for Arizona State University Pastoral.

"In the Bible it says that if you seek God, he will find you. I was really looking, and I was looking everywhere to understand what he wanted to tell me."

The return home

In July 1996, his mental state settled enough to return to Arizona. He lives with the help of credit cards, trying to raise money from his project about a three-axle mill. During his work he accidentally sets fire to his apartment and consequently decides to abandon the project. He eventually moved with his parents to Las Vegas, hoping to save money while working on a book, a sequel to George Orwell's 1984. He never finished it. Manic episodes appear about every six months, and often end up in a psychiatric hospital. He was diagnosed with bipolarism and declared schizophrenic. He simply asks what drug he should take. This no longer causes him any discomfort. He says he learned not to freak out.

"For those few early years, I was really crazy. Now I'm not. I'm crazy, maybe, in a different way."

 

Terry Davis, (L.

This is the terry davis story. Story of a character perhaps crazy but in his own charismatic way, convinced of what he is doing. To date he has repeatedly defended his work and his positions on various forums of programmers, from which he is often banned (or "hellbanned" as Americans like to say) for his aggressive tones in defense of his work. He is also accused of racism. Even on social media, the symptoms of his illness seem quite obvious:

But alternating with simple updates of your work:

TempleOS, God's Operating System

But what exactly is TempleOS, God's operating system, which Davis had previously called SparrowOS and before that LoseThos?  

"God on tap" announces the initial blue text of TempleOS. The welcome screen explains" "A Public Domain Operating System," produced by Trivial Solutions, Las Vegas, Nevada. Trivial Solutions is Davis' company, which, of course, has only one employee. TempleOS is an operating system managed entirely with only 16 colors, at a resolution of 640 x 480. All this is reminiscent of the historic Commodore 64, and is tremendously familiar to those who had the honor of working with the historic Commodore machine. It feels like we're going back to the days when a personal computer was a contraption with which to tinker and program to make things work. Davis will defend the choice of 16 colors and the very small resolution explaining that God himself asked him to use this combination, so that children could use his operating system in a simpler way. I'd say we're on the defensive line.

"It was God who told me that the resolution of 640 x 480, to 16 colors. It's a pact, like circumcision, and it makes it easier for children to draw designs for God."

There's a sprite-based first-person shooter called "Castle Frankenstein" and a dollar-shaped icon that opens a budgeting app. All innocent and trivial. Pressing F7 anywhere in TempleOS summons a pseudo-random "god word". Five F7s could produce a phrase like "flashedt ARE evil madly peacemaker". Shift-F7 directly inserts a passage from the Bible, just to make it clear that this is God's operating system. Let's try again, five f7 in a row: The Jukebox program offers a collection of PC-speaker tracks, with biblically inspired lyrics, such as "Lord, there's a storm upon the sea / Lord, there's a storm upon the sea / Relax, fellas / (Sea glass became)."  

Ten years of work

Despite everything, it is immediately clear that TempleOS is more than a retro programming exercise, or a bare and raw programming job. It is the fruit – perhaps the work of life – of Terry Davis, the founder and sole employee of Trivial Solutions. For over a decade, Davis worked tirelessly on the project. In its first version, TempleOS was about 120,000 lines of code, a joke compared to the millions of lines of today's operating systems, but remember that it was written by one person!

"For ten years I worked on TempleOS programming full-time. Now I'm done, and last year I only made some little tweaks here and there."

Inside TempleOS Devis has built his "oracle" called AfterEgypt, which allows users to climb Mount Horeb via a Moses complete with a stick. After Egypt in actio

n But the idea of a digital oracle is just an evolution of the way he speaks to God. At first he would open a Bible on a random page. However, he did not accept that the chosen page could be his will: he began using coin tosses to choose a page number, then expanded his technique to include all the books in his library. Until you get to its digital oracle, AfterEgypt. As God asked him, Davis worked tirelessly on his operating system. He drinks a lot of caffeine and lives mostly on a 48-hour cycle.

 "Stay awake 16 plus 2 and sleep 8 plus 2."

But are there really ideas? Is it really an operating system?

Shell

TempleOS hides some surprises not bad, starting with the installation: press Y a few times and the installation is finished. Simple and effective. TempleOS has a dedicated programming language, the HolyC. The entire operating system is written in HolyC. The same language is also used for shell. That's right, you can run shell commands using a C-like language, and send it directly to the compiler.  

There is no built-in calculator application, because the shell itself is a calculator. Enter 5 plus 7 on the command line and get the answer. You have a menu that is located in your home directory and that is accessible at any time by pressing Ctrl-M. By editing this file, you can create any type of launcher you want. Most files are automatically saved on exit, but this one doesn't. TempleOS has a system-wide auto-complete method. You can press Ctrl-F1 at any time and get a list of words that complete what you're writing. Not only file names, but also symbol names.
All source code is indexed and you can jump to any function from anywhere, even from the shell. The same system works in any program throughout the operating system. The Type() function is used to display files, such as the DOS "type" or The Unix "cat". Of course, the hypertext is respected. You can also use Type to show . BMP directly in the shell. Here comes an interesting observation, an interesting challenge for other operating systems: why do shells have to be pure text? Why can't we have a media shell?

File Explorer

Most operating systems have something like Explorer, Nautilus or File Manager to allow you to browse directories just by clicking. TempleOS doesn't have a File Manager (Ctrl-D) program, but it's quite a shell extension, and surprisingly you don't need it for most operations. Using the hyperlink system that permeates the entire operating system, the shell itself can act as an explorer. Write "dir" for a list, then just click any directory hyperlink to navigate to that directory and get a new list, all within the same shell. Or click ".." to level up.

HyperText (DolDoc)

The most notable feature of TempleOS is its ubiquitous hypertext system, DolDoc, which is the basis of the shell and text editor. Unlike Unix, which represents everything via plain text, everything in TempleOS is stored in DolDoc format. The format is somewhat similar to RTF, you can press Ctrl-T at any time to examine the raw text directly. But DolDoc is not just for text. You can store images (and even 3D meshes) directly in documents. You can insert macros or hyperlink commands that run when you click.
So, if you want to create a menu or launcher, you just need to create a new text document and insert links into it. HTML, JSON, XML, shell scripts, source files, text files: TempleOS replaces all of these elements with a simple unified hyperlink representation. You can press Ctrl-R at any time to view the asset editor, which lets you draw things. The sprites you draw are embedded directly in the document, and you can reference them using numbered tags. There is no standalone drawing program that comes with the operating system because you already have one accessible at any time, from any program. If you want to draw a doodle, open a new document, draw and save.

HolyC, C.

The programming language provided, HolyC, is a reasonably complete version of C, but with some notable extensions. There is no main() function in TempleOS programs. Everything you write in top-level scope is done as it scrolls through the compiler. In C, you can do something like int a plus myfunction(); but you can't just write myfunction(); and just run it. Wondering why not? Each piece of code in TempleOS (except the initial kernel/compiler) is compiled on demand.
Yes, it's true: you can run a program without compiling it, simply by using a statement #include from the command line. You can tag a function with the directive #help_index, and it will automatically appear in the documentation in the right place. And yes, it's completely dynamic. You don't need to perform a rebuild process, just compile the file and documentation updates. Press F1 and you can see your changes reflected in the help system. You can attach any metadata to any class member. HolyC's class system implements full support for metadata and reflection. Given a class, you can enumerate each member to get its name, offset, etc. What's surprising is that you can also attach any custom metadata to any member of the class at compile time.
Examples of use for this could include storing its default value, min/max range, printf format string. Does your programming language support all of this? The special keyword lastClass can be used as the default argument for functions. Causes the compiler to provide the type name of the previous topic as a string, thus allowing you to search for metadata from it. TempleOS has no environment variables: you only use regular variables.

Programming environment

HolyC does not have a formal compilation system. Just compile a file and that's it. If your project occupies more than one file, you can only include all the files in one and compile it. The compiler can compile 50000 lines of code in less than a second. When you press F5 in the editor, the program compiles Just In Time (JIT) and runs. Top-level statements are executed in turn and the task is now loaded and ready. Does your current IDE support documentation links? H
ow much code do you need to open a window and draw graphics on the operating system you use? In TempleOS, there is a one-to-one correspondence between tasks and windows, so a single call to DCAlias is enough to return the device context for the window. You can do this as soon as your main function is called and draw on it. Creating a window is definitely the most important thing for an operating system with windows – why does it have to be difficult? GDI, X11, DirectX and OpenGL could learn something here.

Hardware and security

There is no hardware support. By that I mean that TempleOS does not support any hardware other than the minimum core system of a PC. There is no support for any graphics card other than the VGA, there is no support for any sound card other than that of the PC and there is no support for the network. TempleOS does not use memory protection. All the code in the system runs on ring 0, the highest privilege level, which means that writing a stray pointer could easily damage the entire system. This is a very deliberate design choice.

"It's fun to have access to everything. When I was a teenager, I had a book, Mapping the Commodore 64, that explained every memory location of the machine. I liked to copy the ROM inRAM and browse through the ROM variables of BASIC. Everyone hit the hardware ports directly."

This is Terry's philosophy, growing up in the 1980s, where all machines like the C64 had the same approach. A standardized platform, you just had to start it and do things locally, on the same machine. The C64 was a very practical machine in which the user was omnipotent. Terry uses the following analogy:

"Linux is a truck, with 20 gears to operate. Windows is more like a machine. TempleOS is a motorcycle. If you get too out of your way, you fall. Don't do it."

It claims that Linux is designed for a mode of use that most people do not use. Linux, he says, aims to be a 1970s mainframe, with 100 users connected at the same time. If a crash occurs in a user's programs, this can block everyone else, and of course not good. But for a personal computer, with only one user, this doesn't make sense. In this case, the operating system should enable the individual user.
TempleOS does not have file permissions. After all, if there's only one user, who else could you give permission to? To be honest, I often wondered if Unix wouldn't be better if we had made sure that all security occurred at the mount level, instead of managing micromanaging for each individual file. There are no things like threads in TempleOS, it doesn't need them. Processes and threads are the same thing, because there is no memory protection. If you need something in parallel, simply generate another process and let it split the data with yours. C

onclusions

In many ways TempleOS looks similar to systems like Xerox Alto, Oberon and Plan 9; an all-encompassing system that blurs the lines between programs and documents. In a video that is no longer available on youtube, Terry offers a brief overview of some of TempleOS's most interesting features. Shows how to build a small graphics application from scratch. Now let's think about how you should do it in Windows for a second. Consider a minute the amount of code needed to register a window, create a window, execute some GDI commands, execute a message, etc. You must set up a Visual Studio project and use the resource editor, embed a bitmap, or try to load it from disk in some way. Now compared with the tiny snippet Terry writes in the video to accomplish the same task, it certainly makes us wonder where we got it wrong to end up so bad. Watching TempleOS run its integrated test suite is a jaw-dropping experience.
I can't help but be impressed that a large number of demos, games, graphic calculators, debuggers and compilers fly under the eyes. Seeing the huge amount of content that has been written here over the years, seeing such an effort spent on a labor of love, is wonderfully exciting. Now I don't expect you to immediately uninstall Windows/Linux/OSX and start using TempleOS as your operating system in your day. However, you may find that if you give yourself time to open your mind to new ideas, you may learn something from the most unexpected places.

So can we learn anything from Davis and TempleOS?

Surely Terry Davis's life could be a script for a great movie. You also have fun calling him crazy, laugh at his elucubrations about God, but in the meantime he has had an incredible life to say the least. He has a degree, a master's degree, he worked, he lived in several cities, he traveled, he was hospitalized, he was arrested, he walked in the desert, he did charity, he created prototypes, he followed projects with passion and, needless to deny it, he is a little genius programming. Davis sees things his own way, and doesn't get influenced by the judgments of others. This is absolutely obvious in TempleOS. What can we learn from TempleOS, his work of a lifetime? The most beautiful answer that comes to mind is:

There's more than one way things can work.

Just because your current tools do all things the same doesn't necessarily mean it's the best way to do it. Just because all your life you've been used to doing things in a way, according to a logic that others have taught you, doesn't mean you have to do it this way.
Davis is detached from all this to see the computer from another point of view, where the computer is a "machine with which to do things". TempleOS just seems like a beautiful transformation of that machine with which we ourselves years ago "did things", of that Commodore that once turned on presented you with a simple blinking cursor, as TempleOS does today. TempleOS has been teased and mistreated by the community. Yet we have seen that there are ideas that are simply brilliant and just as useful.

There's something useful to find in anything.

It's incredibly easy to assume that because something isn't successful or is developed by one guy, there's nothing to discover there. But if someone has invested 12 years of work in something, isn't it possible that you could find even an interesting idea in there? OK, it's 16 colors, it's 640×480 and the author of the operating system is probably his own worst enemy.
But if you discard everything in life because it's not what you're used to, you'll never expand outside the world you already know.  

God's
Lonely Programmer A Co
nstructive Look at TempleOSTem
pleOS: an educational tool for programming experiments
TempleOs Offical Site