A schizophrenic programmer spent 10 years writing an operating system that “saves the world”.
An operating system is an extremely complex piece of software, and the amount of work required for one person to develop it is particularly intimidating.
But Terry Davis, a genius programmer with schizophrenia, claimed to have received instructions from God: you have to build a temple, in the form of an operating system.
So Terry spent 10 years developing his own programming language, editor, compiler, kernel, application from scratch. ……
He has been following a 48-hour routine, drinking lots of coffee, 32 hours awake and 16 hours asleep.
In 2013, Terry announced on the web that the Temple of God (TempleOS) had been built.
Five years later, Terry ended his life by committing suicide on the railway.
The Life of Terry Davis
Terry Davis used an Apple II throughout his childhood and taught himself programming languages on a Commodore 64 as a teenager.
Incidentally, the Commodore was the inspirational computer for many cowboys, such as Iron Man Musk and MineCraft author Persson, who both started their programming careers on the Commodore.
Terry received his Masters in Electrical Engineering from Arizona State University in 1994 and worked at TicketMaster for a few years as a programmer for VAX machines.
During this time, he developed manic episodes, which occurred every six months, and had to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital where he was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Terry became paranoid about space aliens and government agents. Whenever he saw a man in a suit, he thought he was being followed, and out of fear of the agents, he drove his car “on the run”.
When he felt that the radio in his car was communicating with the outside world, he dismantled his vehicle, threw the keys into the desert, and walked aimlessly along the motorway alone.
Terry gradually improved after 2003, but the schizophrenia continued to affect his ability to communicate, and he often made incomprehensible statements online.
Oddly enough, Terry was able to be very lucid when the topic was about computers.
Around this time, Terry claimed to have had a conversation with God, who asked him to write an operating system as a successor to the Second Temple.
So Terry set out on a great journey and started building Temple OS like Noah did.
Terry starts building Temple OS
The temple that God asked to be built was sacred, so Terry built it completely from scratch, and it created a programming language, HolyC, which is somewhere between C and C++.
He then used HolyC to start the development of Temple OS, the boot loader , kernel , windows manager, graphics library and even the games were all done by himself without using any third party libraries.
Terry said that many design decisions of Temple OS come from God’s instructions. For example, God said:
To have 640*480 resolution, 16 colours, so that children are more likely to draw for God.
Temple OS is 64-bit, multi-threaded, don’t want network capabilities.
No encryption or passwords, files are compressed, not encrypted.
To keep programmers as close to the hardware as possible, so Temple OS dropped all security measures and memory protection, every application runs in privileged mode (Ring 0)
HolyC is not only the programming language of Temple OS, it is also the operating system’s shell, which means that Terry implements JIT and HolyC can be run directly without compilation.
The IDE Terry built is also unique in that it uses a proprietary format: DolDoc, which supports embedding images, hyperlinks, and 3D meshes into ASCII files, and even a rotating 3D tank model can be embedded in the comments of a piece of code.
The Temple OS interface is somewhat retro, like a mix of Commodore 64 and DESQview.
Biblical references are ubiquitous in Temple OS.
Terry developed the game After Egypt, in which the player can climb Mount Sinai with Moses, at the top of which you can see burning bushes, and the system selects random passages from the Bible for the player to read.
Terry believes that these texts come from God.
God demanded a perfect temple, Terry says: “For ten years I worked full-time on TempleOS development. I’m basically done, with just a few minor changes last year.”
Temple OS has a total of 121,176 lines of code, comparable to Photoshop 1.0.
Temple OS has received a lot of praise from professionals since its release:
“Temple OS demonstrates one man’s extraordinary technical prowess and dedication.”
“A legend in the programming world, a skyscraper built by one man.”
“The fact that Terry wrote the OS all by himself is so astounding that it is difficult for a layman to comprehend such an
extraordinary achievement.”
“Without mental illness, he would be another ‘Steve Jobs’ or ‘Steve Wozniak’”
Terry suffered from mental illness and passed away.
Terry had been suffering from schizophrenia and in December 2017, Terry had a heated argument with his parents who gave him an ultimatum: either take his medication or go to hospital for treatment.
Thinking the medication would stifle his creativity, Terry ran away from home.
When he was homeless, fans offered him food, various supplies, and even shelter.
But Terry rejected these kind offers.
He deleted most of the videos he posted online because God said not to litter and because he had learned how to “cleanse” himself.
On the night of 11 August 2018, Terry was walking along the railway tracks when a train came up behind him and he turned around to face it before it hit him.
The programmer, God’s chosen genius, passed away after suffering from mental illness.
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