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Comment by thinkingemote | Hacker News Reader

The question is why more people have not done it.

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.

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Most people don't have 10 years of uninterrupted time to spend on an art project. Most of those who do choose to spend that time on something other than writing a compiler and OS.

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.

This is why I think Richard Stallman had some success. His living requirement where so low that for most of the 1980's/early 90's, he only had to work 6 weeks to make all the money he needed for that year.

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.

And because he built actually useful things.

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.

Absolutely, it is kind of the badge of an operating system that if it can run the GNU tool chain - it is a complete operating system.

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.

A lot of people did.

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.

Others have done it, but not many.

You can find such projects in sourceforge.

> The question is why more people have not done it.

What practical value does it bring outside of 15 minute awe from internet nerds? No sarcasm.

> What practical value does it bring outside of 15 minute awe from internet nerds?

I think that's exactly the point - it doesn't. That's why it's an artpiece.

Many people have an interest in things made with / for computers outside of their utility value. You certainly, certainly do.

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.

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