A Constructive Look at TempleOS (2015)
codersnotes.com
codersnotes.com
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
>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...
Ash to ... And dust to dust.
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/