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On Terry A. Davis

schizophrenic.io

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Re: On Terry A. Davis

#71

Post by iforgotpassword »

wiseowise wrote: post #61
VS1999 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is your third nearly identical post in this thread. Is it so important to you that people don't find value in something you think isn't notable?

I’m not them, but parroting something without having any substance behind it is how myths are born.

I think enough people in this very comment section have brought forward good points regarding what exactly they find noteworthy, impressive or inspiring about TempleOS, while that person has left nothing but dismissive comments without substance.

Re: On Terry A. Davis

#72

Post by jamesu »

xanderlewis wrote: post #23
codetrotter wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what was the point of TempleOS 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 te…

> 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. 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?

It amazes me how much terry latched onto that idea, even binding the "god says" functionality to the F7 key in TempleOS. Sometimes I wonder how he would have reacted to ChatGPT and LLMs.

Re: On Terry A. Davis

#73

Post by whstl »

thinkingemote wrote: post #13
YPPH wrote: post #10

Not to trivialise his achievement, but I'd be willing to wager any moderately competent systems programmer, if given 10+ years and no other commitments (work or family) could write a programming language, compiler, and real mode operating system for an x86_64 system. Side note, why were Ticketmaster hiring systems programmers writing such low level code? I grew up in the 90s/00s so missed this era of computing.

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 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.

Re: On Terry A. Davis

#74

Post by skissane »

YPPH wrote: post #10

Not to trivialise his achievement, but I'd be willing to wager any moderately competent systems programmer, if given 10+ years and no other commitments (work or family) could write a programming language, compiler, and real mode operating system for an x86_64 system. Side note, why were Ticketmaster hiring systems programmers writing such low level code? I grew up in the 90s/00s so missed this era of computing.

> Side note, why were Ticketmaster hiring systems programmers writing such low level code? I grew up in the 90s/00s so missed this era of computing.

At some point in the 1970s or 1980s, Ticketmaster made the extremely unusual decision of writing their own operating system for VAX. Even back then, that was a pretty weird decision. And it wasn't Terry's idea, they started doing it before he worked there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9808995

And apparently decades later their backend was still stuck on it (is it still stuck on it???), albeit now running under a software emulator instead of physical VAX hardware.

Most people on VAX ran either Unix or VMS, both of which offered migration paths to other platforms (Alpha -> Itanium -> x86 for VMS; and there were lots of alternative hardware platforms for Unix). But Ticketmaster's weird decision to write their own OS made that almost impossible.

Re: On Terry A. Davis

#75

Post by ugjka »

As schizophrenic myself i feel like Terry has became a meme but without anyone ever realizing what terrible condition he was in and he was in a terrible country that has no safety nets and basic healthcare for people like him

Re: On Terry A. Davis

#76

Post by westmeal »

ugjka wrote: post #75

As schizophrenic myself i feel like Terry has became a meme but without anyone ever realizing what terrible condition he was in and he was in a terrible country that has no safety nets and basic healthcare for people like him

Yeah and 4chan didn't help either as usual. Well, some people tried to - but on the whole people just treated him as another thing to laugh at. RIP terry.

Re: On Terry A. Davis

#77

Post by marginalia_nu »

Terry is a bit of a hero of mine.

He's definitely a tragic character, almost Shakespearean, with all manner of flaws, and he got dealt a really rotten hand in life, but there's just something about the determination with which he pursued his unique vision through hell or high water that really appeals to me.

Re: On Terry A. Davis

#78

Post by VelesDude »

mort96 wrote: post #44
thinkingemote wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

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.

Re: On Terry A. Davis

#79

Post by skissane »

astrobe_ wrote: post #15

> Let’s be clear: schizophrenia does not cause racism Depends on the type of racism. If it's a false sense of superiority - probably the most common type of racism - well, maybe. But if it's the belief that some type of people are hostile to you for some reason, and your personality makes it so that you return it, then it is a persecutory delusion, just like conspiracy theories.

Schizophrenia absolutely can induce racism in some people.

Schizophrenia (and other related disorders) can induce in some people obsessive socially unacceptable thoughts, which can include racist thoughts. It doesn't happen to everyone with schizophrenia – there are plenty of people with schizophrenia who aren't racist. And even if a person with schizophrenia is racist, it isn't necessarily due to their schizophrenia – they could well be racist for the same reasons many people without schizophrenia are racist. But that said, there absolutely are some people who aren't racist, and then they have a psychotic episode, and as a result of that psychotic episode they develop racist delusions/obsessions.

This can take the form of persecutory delusions, but not always. Schizophrenic delusions can take make many forms other than just persecutory, so in some people schizophrenia can induce non-persecutory racist delusions.

Re: On Terry A. Davis

#80

Post by whstl »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #68
wiseowise wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because internet loves mystery and hype? 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.

I'm pretty sure none of my colleagues have heard of the James Webb Space Telescope either but I'd still say it's a notable thing. You're conflating mainstream fame with notability. Honestly I doubt many of my colleagues are familiar with Linux either (I work in a supermarket).

What GP says is unfortunately true, though.

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.

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