There are many geniuses in the computer science world. There's John Carmack, the lead developer of DOOM; there's Linus Torvalds the mind behind the Linux kernel; there's Dennis Ritchie the mind behind the C programming language and UNIX (the most influential Operating system on earth); and many others. However none of them, and I mean it when I say none of them come close to doing what Terry Davis did on his own: create a full blown operating system.

I know you might not see it as anything, but this guy did something that no one might ever do again. The OS isn't just a terminal only environment like UNIX. It has a GUI, a 2D and 3D graphics library, and a host of other things that cannot be done by one man alone. Though it didn't have internet capabilities (considering many manufacturers of network cards hoard their documentation), it's still a great feat nonetheless.

Why would one man do all this? Because, as he claims, God told him to.

To understand this further let's take a peek at how, why and when this project started. It's 2003, and Terry A. Davis had had been living with his parents for some years after losing his job due to schizophrenia. Finally, the frequent hospitalisation has stopped and he has free time to himself, so he decides to devote all the free time he has to a project. One of the most time consuming tasks any programmer would never dream of undertaking on his own: An Operating System project. The project started under the name: the J Operating System. Davis intended it to be like the Commodore 64 (don't know if any old timer here has used one). It's main difference being faster processing speed and a more coherent system. However, come 2008, he changed the name again to "LoseThos" and Davis's vision for it was an OS used to develop games. Ofcourse, like you already know the name changed again, and finally, once again, to TempleOS.

The project took ten years to finish and was finally released in 2013. It had a host of features. A text editor, games, a 2d and 3d graphics library, multitasking, a compiler for a programming language created by Davis himself, and a shell like bash.

He hit the forums (Reddit, Osdev, ycombinator etc) to tell everyone about his new OS. He was really persistent and weird because he would write huge blocks of random text (which he claimed was speaking in tongues) and would lash out at his critics which would get him bans and, even worse, shadow bans. Even after he finished the project he still continued, sometimes writing under alternate monikers. However, even a change in monikers was still noticeable because of how crazy he was.

This continued for some time till he started to get unfavourable attention which later turned to a fandom, none of which made his life any better. Soon enough, he left his parents house and went on to live a nomadic life till his death in 2018. He was hit by a train. The police report that was released later on said that he was walking along the track while the train was coming, and on seeing it, did nothing to save his own life. In fact, he turned back to look it square in the face till the end.

Linus Torvalds.

Linux OS.

Mukina2
Lalasticlala

John Carmack is a legend. The Golden ages of FPS

qtguru:
John Carmack is a legend. The Golden ages of FPS

Be like say you don play DOOM. You be old papa o

LienwaltAbel:

Be like say you don play DOOM. You be old papa o