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On Terry A. Davis

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Re: On Terry A. Davis

#101

Post by seanmcdirmid »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #100
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.

Not to suggest that the parent comment trivialises the work, but there is big difference between "could do it" and "did it". Only the later deserves respect. Also, the parent commenter's hypothetical does not take into account that the "moderately competent systems programmer" would have to do this work while suffering from a debilitating mental illness. To be clear, this is not simply a question of "Given 10+ years…

Most of us can't take a 10+ year sabbatical to do this kind of stuff. Even in academia, you get bogged down in grants and keeping your grad students fed.

Not discounting his achievement though, it is still noteworthy.

Re: On Terry A. Davis

#103

Post by VelesDude »

dale_glass wrote: post #99
VelesDude wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: On Terry A. Davis

#105

Post by helpfulContrib »

speed_spread wrote: post #69
helpfulContrib wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my first jobs as a junior programmer in the 80's was to build a multimedia engine that would boot both on CGA and EGA (and then, later, VGA) systems, was not allowed to use any MS-DOS calls (BIOS and pure assembly only) and it had to run the same bytecode scripts for the programs being made with the engine, seemlessly. It had a compiler for the script, a bytecode interpreter and VM, and different HAL's dependi…

Writing TempleOS was his way of coping with his illness. His software was his refuge, a place where he felt safe and things made sense.

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