The 64-Bit Temple Operating System | Hacker News Reader

The 64-Bit Temple Operating System

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18 pointsmorganwilde11 comments

For those who don't know, this was created by HN member losetheOS aka SparrowOS. You won't see his comments unless you shave ShowDead enabled in your profile, as many people find his comments confusing.

Terry is schizophrenic and this sometimes make communications tricky, but I'm in awe of how he's developed a complete operating environment from scratch and which is quite different from anything else I'm aware of. Also, I really appreciated the insight this video gave into his motivations for the OS and how he uses it. Thanks for uploading the video Terry, and to morganwilde for posting it on HN.

It's more art than OS, and the art world is all the more interesting from having people with wildly divergent viewpoints.

My only disappointment is there isn't a proper Wikipedia page for this project.

The comments from the dead are rather...enlightening.

There's a lot of interesting detail in the Metafilter thread about an earlier version: http://www.metafilter.com/119424/An-Operating-System-for-Son...

That's a quick summary. I've been casually following the developments of this project for a while now ever since it showed up on the radar of OSDev and from there Something Awful which has a talent for curating the uniquely surreal.

It's an achievement on the scale of Henry Darger's collection (http://www.folkartmuseum.org/darger) and perhaps stands alone as an example of "outsider art" in the world of operating system design.

Thanks for the link. It really helped me gain a deep appreciation of the person behind all the dead links and to understand what an amazing Hacker he is.

I found this in the comment thread under the recent post on writing a kernel. I think it was Terry himself that put up the link there. The amount of work and knowledge required to do what he did is just astonishing.

From the MetaFilter Thread comes Terry's description of his work:

I wnated to make a souped-up, modern 64-bit, C64 so teenagers could do what I did in high school. I had the book Mapping the C64 and I had hours of fun poking and proding around with all the internals of the operationg system for cheap thrills. I wanted to let people control the hardware directly. I wanted something simple, to get your head around. LoseThos is two orders of magnitude simpler than Linux. LoseThos is 135,000 lines of code including my compiler. It is 100% self contained and complete. When I got Linux, I was disappointed because I thought "open source" meant I would have fun messing with the code. Linux tries to support so many architectures and has a main frame operating system, that it's too complex. LoseThos is way way way simpler. Plus it has many innovative ideas. It is not ASCII source code, for example.

I wonder if there was any special reason for choosing x64, other than that it's the most powerful architecture that is easily accessible. Will TempleOS (or some future version) ever be implemented for ARM or other platforms like the Mill? (http://millcomputing.com/docs/)

Edit: there is a lot of explanation at http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Accts/TS/Wb2/TempleOS.html - I guess I should have asked 'are you only interested in x64, or other architectures too?'

There's way too much assembly in there for this to ever be ported in any practical sense:

http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Accts/TS/Wb2/LineRep.html

It's written in a C and C++ like language with a heavy helping of assembly thrown in. That sort of thing is usually reserved for embedded platforms where every nanosecond counts, but in this case it's the go-to language. This might be an artifact of how earlier in the project the assembler part was a lot more reliable than the rest of the compiler.

You'll do better if you look at it as an art project, or more accurately, the product of a gifted but mentally ill mind. It's not the next Linux.

I know that. I just wonder if Terry is interested in building on other architectures besides x64 - though I do think its a great teaching/hacking tool in the tradition of the 80s home computers he references as inspiration.

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