On Terry A. Davis
schizophrenic.io
schizophrenic.io
He's definitely a tragic character, almost Shakespearean, with all manner of flaws, and he got dealt a really rotten hand in life, but there's just something about the determination with which he pursued his unique vision through hell or high water that really appeals to me.
I had the pleasure of interacting with him in the form of creating a GIMP plugin for his custom image file format.
Good for you. I am happy for you. (truly)
But to then extend that to everyone with a similar diagnosis, as some form of universal fact is entirely wrong.
Delusion and paranoid delusions are common symptoms of schizophrenia¹. Common does not mean everyone for sure has them, just that many do.
In so far as schizophrenia does not make you racists that is true, but you do not get to pick your delusions. They may be an amplification of existing opinions, but for many they are not. Further to blame a person who is delusional for having a view of the world that is not normal, well that is the entire description of delusions.
Can you blame a person who stutters for stuttering?
Thus one should extend a lot of tolerance to a person who has a terrible illness that no way is self-afflicted and one that we do not yet have a dependable cure for.
I am certain that at some point in this life Terry desperately wished to be “normal”. Farther into it, and getting deeper into the illness the understanding of normal vs abnormal may be a difficult concept to understand for the person.
I have had schizophrenia in my family, and I have visited her at the hospital. Where there were a lot of other schizophrenics. Clearly only those who suffer a lot and who may become violent ad self-harming, ends up at such a place long term.
Some of the people there had an incredibly different reality that they existed within.
We should extend a generous amount of tolerance for people who are ill and suffer from this. To get angry and tell them to stop and tell then they are wrong may well cause a deeper fall into paranoia.
This is not something people chose. Nor is it something we have a reliable cure for. Some can be greatly helped with medication and / or therapy. Other not.
¹ https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/schizophrenia/sy... https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/schizophrenia/w...
Depends on the type of racism. If it's a false sense of superiority - probably the most common type of racism - well, maybe. But if it's the belief that some type of people are hostile to you for some reason, and your personality makes it so that you return it, then it is a persecutory delusion, just like conspiracy theories.
I grew up with a diverse group of friends, we used every slur under the sun to shit talk eachother and still do when being idiots. Those slurs have no meaning to us beyond the comedic value they provide in their vulgarity. I'd be shocked to discover any of us were racist, pretty strange to have not noticed after >20 years.
Schizophrenia (and other related disorders) can induce in some people obsessive socially unacceptable thoughts, which can include racist thoughts. It doesn't happen to everyone with schizophrenia – there are plenty of people with schizophrenia who aren't racist. And even if a person with schizophrenia is racist, it isn't necessarily due to their schizophrenia – they could well be racist for the same reasons many people without schizophrenia are racist. But that said, there absolutely are some people who aren't racist, and then they have a psychotic episode, and as a result of that psychotic episode they develop racist delusions/obsessions.
This can take the form of persecutory delusions, but not always. Schizophrenic delusions can take make many forms other than just persecutory, so in some people schizophrenia can induce non-persecutory racist delusions.
As for socially unacceptable thoughts, yeah what yesterday was acceptable is today unacceptable. :)
It is possible, that without schizophrenia, he would never have been racist. (At least if we define "racism" in terms of explicit statements/actions, as opposed to unconscious biases.)
It is possible that he always was racist, and would have been even without schizophrenia, but schizophrenia took away his ability to hide it from others, or made him not care about doing that.
Nobody can really know.
This is how society works to make progress, yes.
It’s kind of interesting how I’ve come to expect blog posts to be much longer since microblogging pretty much exists exclusively on social media.
Because providing a 'product' is the sole criterion for success? The author is missing the point and doesn't understand TempleOS.
Sound like Terry himself wanted it to be successful?
Wasn't the OS made to be used by people for real and not just as a toy?
Could people use it for real? As a daily driver to get things done? (A real product)
I do not think so, so what do you think what was the point of TempleOS then?
From what I’ve seen from videos where Terry was talking about TempleOS, it seems that a large part of the point of the OS and the programs that shipped with it was as a way of “talking to god”. Where he’d run a program and it would generate some random output and he said that those were words from god. I have to assume that this was very much because of his condition. Either way, a temple to god is part of what this OS was. TempleOS.
Furthermore, TempleOS validated many of his ideas of how an OS could be built differently from how many other OSes are made.
TempleOS is like a modern day Amiga or Commodore 64 operating system.
And I could easily imagine a world in which TempleOS was distributed preinstalled on some kind of non-networked home computer that they could have in Sunday schools around the world, as a tool for bible study and as a way of learning about computers, engaging youth who are interested in technology.
I actually think that seems perfectly internally consistent from the perspective of someone who seriously believes in a god. If (pseudo)random numbers and therefore the output of that program aren’t controlled by god, what is?
In the end Terry just found a faster source of randomness.
Even as a non-religious person, I think that was one of the most relatable aspects of him. He really wanted to communicate.
Every religious group (Christian or otherwise) I know of uses the internet, and the web in particular, to spread and discuss their ideas. The Vatican has a website that has the catechism, encyclicals, documents of church councils etc. There is lots of material about things like the interpretation of the Bible. A Jehovah's Witness I know recently sent me links to pages on their website promoting creationism. I replied with links to biologos.org (a mainstream Christian website about evolution and science) debunking her claims.
I have also found websites about every variant of every religion I have wanted to know about. I could do with a good explanation of Sikh concepts of God though if anyone can point me to one - I am sure it exists though.
Why would a Sunday school want to cut themselves off from all this material? Within a high controlling cult maybe. Not in general.
I think a world in which TempleOS was widely used would require lots of people to share Terry's beliefs about what technology was desirable and what was not.
> a way of learning about computers, engaging youth who are interested in technology
I have not tried TempleOS but it seems to be made to be tinkered with so sounds promising for education.
They could still have their iPads and internet connected laptops and other computers.
I’m not saying they should use TempleOS and nothing else.
I’m just saying it could make for a fun additional curious thing that they could have there and which the kids could use both for bible things and for technological interest.
> for technological interest.
As I said, I agree with that.
That was just a personal interest of him, and something that the rest of the internet latched into heavily.
I personally remember him preferring to talk about technical stuff whenever possible.
Unfortunately he failed to find communities that wanted to talk about his preferred flavor of tech with him. The more I type those messages the more I remember: he just wanted to chat and drive attention to his OS.
It could be, but "getting things done" here means communicating with God, not taking zoom calls.
That said, extreme idiosyncrasy is relatively common in schizophrenia.
Ask your colleagues if they heard about, and if they heard about it what is noticeable about it.
Majority of internet see “Ooh, that’s not Linux, Windows, Mac and has a lot of custom things written from scratch”. And also funni racist genius schizo.
From talking with other people online, most people and articles fetishize the disease and the posts with racist words, and never really paid any attention to the OS itself.
Which to me is the saddest part. Before Terry started being banned from every place in the internet, he was chatty and always trying to drum up interest from others in hobbyist communities. Almost nobody paid attention (perhaps because everyone was also trying to do the same for their own OS), and those of us who did eventually got burned for obvious reasons. And the worst is that most people still don't care. His personality, his death, his disease, and his different practice of faith became more famous than the work he cared about, and that's all laypeople talk about. In HN people at least have a realistic view of TempleOS.
There are people who develop their own operating systems as a hobby. There are people who design and implement their own programming languages as a hobby. For a single person to do both, in the one project, is actually pretty rare. Most people find trying to do both, together, is biting off way more than they can chew
I was actually one of those. Started with an assembly, moved on to bigger things.
Sure, the squares were using POSIX and C. But we did things different.
Edit: I'm sorry if I come across as arrogant. I still have the "decoration" (programming-wise) of my elite education I am trying to trim. :(
Side note, why were Ticketmaster hiring systems programmers writing such low level code? I grew up in the 90s/00s so missed this era of computing.
A bit like picassos answer to someone saying to him about his art "I could have done that!!" being "why haven't you?"
I would put templeos at the same level as art in that it's the creation and life rather than the craft or utility. Or in other words there is something transcendental about the project which would go beyond (but not technically) something a competent systems programmer should write as a hobby.
Art Vs craft has more of an artist inside of it. Noone else could have written templeos.
EDIT: to be clear, that doesn't mean it's not impressive or not a great achievement. It's a fantastic piece of art IMO.
It opened him up to work on building/promoting GNU and FSF.
I have said for years that things like Free software would have come along eventually, he just happened to be in the right position to make it happen when it did.
I never worked with Solaris and the like, but it's my understanding the GNU tools were useful enough that they got routinely installed on the commercial unixes before Linux came along.
This is sadly something that seems to be getting lost. GNU tooling doesn't seem that competitive anymore, and the trend is to write newer, fancier replacements, like ripgrep for example.
I am still 100% on board with the libre/freedom stuff but you are right, a lot of the GNU stuff is being over run by more nimble newer things. A part of that is probably in part due to the technical legacy of some of the GNU tools having code dating back to the 1970's.
You can find such projects in sourceforge.
What practical value does it bring outside of 15 minute awe from internet nerds? No sarcasm.
I think that's exactly the point - it doesn't. That's why it's an artpiece.
That’s how art works. And computers are confined to Solving Business Problems and Delivering Value To Shareholders. What a boring existence that’d be. On an unrelated note, I don’t live in Silicon Valley.
I met Terry online in a couple OSDev forums in the early 00s, before his downward spiral. He was already quite combative, but still coherent. This was even before he named it LoseThos (he changed the name a few times after). I used and gave feedback.
Anyway: There were about a hundred people back then writing hobby operating systems. Perhaps everyone in those forums was? I was one of them. Some OSs had graphics. Some had POSIX. A few people could even run Firefox. I never got to this point. Some even had that same C64-like character of TempleOS.
Like GP, this is not to trivialize the work and dedication that went into TempleOS. But unfortunately he didn't became famous because of it at all. Most reddit people who talk about TempleOS haven't even installed the OS, and pretty much everyone that mentioned TempleOS to me in real life haven't even seen Youtube videos of it.
Which is very sad, because IMO lack of people using it is why Terry ended up becoming isolated and combative in those communities. People still care more about a cool story than a labour of love.
What I like about TempleOS is that Terry wasn't afraid to make something new and unique, even though it was completely incompatible with everything else.
DolDoc is such a cool idea. Not a unique one, but you don't find many operating systems which have a shell based on that. Since the command output is in DolDoc, you can type `DIR` at the command line and get a list which expands into the whole file tree when you click on it. DolDoc also means that his games have all the images and models embedded in the code, and you can just go there and edit them.
And there are a lot of these. Sure it's clunky and weird and sort of unusable, but I appreciate it for what it is. And I think it's really awesome. Take a look at a random person's osdev project and you'll see mostly the same thing — a unix-like that tries to be compatible with POSIX and port all the utilities. TempleOS is as far from that as you can get (though definitely not unique either).
(Also, a minor correction: TempleOS is not real mode, it runs in full 64-bit mode with symmetric multiprocessing and everything. The text UI isn't the VGA text mode, it's a framebuffer that also displays graphics).
I think this also touches on the other thing that makes TempleOS cool. It was designed as a modern C64, and a lot of the weird design decisions come directly from that. It's a hacker's operating system and it shows.
I seem to remember seeing a different take on hackable operating systems, something written in Scheme with a PreScheme core I think? I remember thinking it was pretty cool. The dynamic nature of Scheme allowed you to have access to pretty much anything you want, but also run programs with less privileges.
Of course there's also DuskOS. It's written in Forth which I like, but I'm not the biggest fan of their dialect. I'd like to attempt something in a more classical Forth, but I never get to it. One of these days...
Very different to Competent Systems Programmer writing Unix Clone #983
It deserves to be talked about. The cult following and media attention that he got is really just a function of the romanticizing of mental illness and the "crazy genius" trope that people projected on him.
Writing a decent operating system is a good technical achievement but quite a few people have done so as hobby projects. The real attention came from this "temple for god" thing. Instead people should have talked about what it was, a mentally ill person that had no help for decades and it cost him his life. It's quite astonishing and telling that with all the attention he had, he ran around homeless and confused while people were treating him like a circus curiosity or fringe religious character.
It had a compiler for the script, a bytecode interpreter and VM, and different HAL's depending on the system in use, with the VM being used to play what were then called "multimedia" titles - graphics and text and sound, all on the same screen. This all had to be done by me, a lowly junior, and when it was finally delivered and titles were shipped, I moved on to other things .. an online version of the engine that could get its bytecode over ethernet .. and I had to write all the drivers and HAL code myself.
Sure, this was the 80's and programmers were a different breed then, but it always bugs me when Mr Special 21st Century Comp-Sci Grad comes onboard to his first ever 'real' job and yet .. has no idea how to even find the compiler on his system, let alone build one himself.
There is a deleterious effect with the computing industry, which happens whenever the New Cool Shit™ hits the scene - everyone forgets the Old Cool Shit™ as fast as they can - but, inevitably, eventually, you are gonna have to learn how to write a compiler, kids, and build a VM/ecosystem around it, at the very least. (Or just use Lua, lol...)
When I first encountered TempleOS, I wasn't as impressed as my peers - this is just how we did things in the 80's - but what was impressive was the persistence he exhibited in extending TempleOS in spite of the great personal suffering under which he clearly labored ..
TempleOS is just about the worse possible example of this.
At some point in the 1970s or 1980s, Ticketmaster made the extremely unusual decision of writing their own operating system for VAX. Even back then, that was a pretty weird decision. And it wasn't Terry's idea, they started doing it before he worked there.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9808995
And apparently decades later their backend was still stuck on it (is it still stuck on it???), albeit now running under a software emulator instead of physical VAX hardware.
Most people on VAX ran either Unix or VMS, both of which offered migration paths to other platforms (Alpha -> Itanium -> x86 for VMS; and there were lots of alternative hardware platforms for Unix). But Ticketmaster's weird decision to write their own OS made that almost impossible.
But could they do it while suffering from severe psychosis and believing that they were being hunted by bioluminescent CIA operatives?
Also, the parent commenter's hypothetical does not take into account that the "moderately competent systems programmer" would have to do this work while suffering from a debilitating mental illness.
To be clear, this is not simply a question of "Given 10+ years with no other committments, could someone else do this work?" The question is whether another person with schizophrenia has actually done this work, staying focused for such an extended period.
(If it's common for employed "developers" to have schizophrenia, then please disregard this comment.)
Not discounting his achievement though, it is still noteworthy.