http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-temp...
Terry himself is schizophrenic but it's a fascinating piece of outsider art in many respects. He's even posted on HN under several accounts, but he's aggressive and disruptive and inevitably ends up banned.
I read some of your post history - can you explain how what you were doing with Ticketmaster was systems programming? It sounds like what would now be considered application programming, but I have no idea how intensive your work was at the time. High-performance code can often cross the line.
TempleOS is simply fascinating. I'm sure you know that I can't agree on the 'divine' part but it's certainly a fascinating OS. Writing an OS is a tough task by any means, let alone a reasonably fast one with a novel presentation. That's a lot of work, even for a productive OS programmer.
Have you taken a look at MenuetOS, Plan9, Oberon, or other non-traditional OSs? I'm curious what you have to think of their own unique features.
I applaud your goal of taking it back to basics. I think you're largely right about the number of abstractions between you and the hardware. Really really fast code needs to be written close to the metal.
I worked in VAX assembly language.
I did firmware for a bar code reader networking device with keypad and display. I worked on image processing for an actual bar code reader itself.
I worked there 1990-1996. About half was user space. The other half was kernel or firmware on bare metal.
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Pat and I started at the same time. He was in school with me, in fact in my differential equations class. He dropped out of school. I stayed in and got my master's in electrical engineering while working part time at Ticketmaster. I graduated with master's in 1994 and stayed with Ticketmaster for a year.
I returned to Ticketmaster for 3 weeks in 2002. Pat was a boss.