Terry was a nut, but he did a pretty good job of getting the word out about his magnum opus. Over several years, he alternated between sincere advocacy and unhinged abuse in trying to get my website OSNews to cover his OS development efforts more widely. Eventually, one of our volunteer editors patiently worked with him to produce an article about it:
I just spent a few minutes reviewing my email archive of correspondence with Terry, and it warms my heart a little, even though at the time is was kind of terrifying.
I learned today that Terry died. There is mist in my eyes and pain in my heart. I wish I could have helped him.
Sorry Terry, you were born with a loaded gun. I wish we could have healed you. I wish we could have taken care of you. I wish you were still here to share your gift with the world.
I’ll install Temple OS on a Raspi in your honor and memory.
I can't explain the sadness I felt when I learned that 4Chan brigades are largely responsible for how quickly his situation deteriorated.
For those who, like me, didn't know, he had begun live-streaming, where he would take call-ins to his landline. It's there that a concerted campaign to get Terry to alienate himself from his parents (with whom he lived) and stop taking his medication. This is not to mention how they egged on romantic feelings for a YouTube personality who they would later impersonate and torture him with in awful ways.
All this led to Terry's parents being unable to house him. They were very old and the situation became impossible. Terry survived on the streets for sometime, meeting up with (genuine and loving) fans along the way. Terry sadly was struck by a train.
We were able to celebrate an eccentric and strange life because of the internet. It also ended it. I hope the internet can heal... I know people like you and I hope it can. It didn't here.
If you want to learn more about Terry's life and death, please check out Fredrick Knudsen's video essay. It is in-depth and important, although very challenging because of the subject matter.
Finally, if you feel like you or someone you care for are in crisis, or might be soon, consider speaking to the folks at NAMI in the US. If you're not in the US, they can direct you to people in your country.
This makes me so angry. Usually, mob justice is a bad thing but there are few legal recourses here; can we make sure that the stain of this man's death never washes away from the people who perpetrated this act?
If the live streams are still up, can we (with the family's blessing) find the people who called in to hurt this man? Would it be okay to publicly name them and link to his suicide and what each individual did?
It feels odd to ask for a punishment via the commons, but this man deserves some measure of justice for his passing.
I sincerely enjoyed Terry A. Davis' videos on youtube.
Yes, You need to actively remember that you are dealing with a person with severe and possibly badly treated/untreated mental illness, and I say this because of the random bouts of aggressiveness and also blatant use of curse words such as n*gger and etc. Also his very skewed political views and whatnot.
But if you can keep that in mind ("I am dealing with a sick person") and forgive his behavior during those bad events, you'll be able to "savor" his videos in a very technical way. The guy was truly a genius on its own league, a fact that, together with his mental illness, probably hurled him further into loneliness
(I am sure several bright people here on HN can relate on how being different or bright sometimes equals loneliness, specially during early years).
So please, try to watch his videos with these guidelines in mind, you'll surely be able to get some good lessons about delivering a vision, lowlevel compiler work or algorithms into your own craft.
I don't like running TempleOS on hardware or in a full fledged VM(Seems like overkill). I would like to make an alternate virtual machine to run TempleOs programs on, in Javascript using a Canvas element for UI. I am unsure if there are constructs which TempleOS uses which are unrepresentable in a virtual machine built inside of a javascript virtual machines - like threads, interrupts, etc. I think events could be wired up as interrupts and there is probably a way to simulate threads in a single thread but I have no experience here. If anyone has any insight into what the challenges of such an approach would be, I would love to hear them.
Philosophical objection: that is exactly the opposite of what TempleOS is about.
Practical objection: By the time you've done that, you'd have written a complete IBM-PC-to-browser compatibility layer. ... This would be super cool if it worked, I'm just sceptical.
Re: complete IBM-PC-to-browser- I am not sure about that. I think that the Holy C compiler only emits a small subset of all of the x86/64 Instruction set.
If you'd like to write a PC-emulator in Javascript I can only tell you good-look. It can be done, it has been done for example <https://www.pcjs.org/>, but it will require the kind of low-level PC hardware knowledge which takes a while to come together.
Yes you'll need interrupts, but you'll need a hell of a lot more than that! If you're interested in learning about emulation then start with chip-8, or a similar simple system. Once you've done that you'll become much more aware of all the parts you're not aware of.
But seriously this is a lot of work, rewarding work, commercially useful work, but a throwaway comment "Lets do this in javascript with <canvas>" is a significantly understated commen suggests to me you don't understand the scope of what you're proposing - not that this should stop you, it would be rewarding. It's just a fine line between pondering "What if ..?" and being insulting to Terry.
There is no reason why this couldn't be done, AFAIK.
You can run QEMU in a web browser [0], although it could be interesting to see a webassembly port. It would be an interesting experience to scroll such an article with live, interactive VMs snapshoted at different stages instead of static images.
Indeed. That algorithmic music is something else... each time I hear it I don't know what to say and I used to create experimental electronic music all the time...
A way to think about it is that music, to Terry, is quite literally the voice of God. Imagine what meaning things like this hymn Risen (the theme song of TempleOS) must have: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3zCwrbOvEU
Have there been any major improvements/updates/upgrades to TempleOS in the last year or so? Haven't seen the author of the OS posting around much in that time.
It seems like there is ample opportunity for someone to issue a more polished TempleOS with a little less idiosyncrasy and a little more userland but still preserve the quick and dirty feel, the tightly integrated compiler and runtime and the minimal separation from the metal that makes it unique.
https://www.osnews.com/story/23796/recreational-programming-...
I just spent a few minutes reviewing my email archive of correspondence with Terry, and it warms my heart a little, even though at the time is was kind of terrifying.