Because providing a 'product' is the sole criterion for success? The author is missing the point and doesn't understand TempleOS.
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. :(
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.
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.
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.
It could be, but "getting things done" here means communicating with God, not taking zoom calls.