Submitted by Terrence Andrew Davis, sole creator and developer of TempleOS (née LoseThos), has passed away at age 48. Davis suffered from mental illness – schizophrenia – which had a severe impact on his life. He claimed he created his operating system after having spoken with and receiving instructions from god, and he was a controversial figure, also here on OSNews, for his incomprehensible rants and abrasive style towards OSNews readers and staff. We eventually had to ban him, but our then-editor Kroc Kamen worked with him in 2010 to publish an article about his operating system despite his ban.
Davis was clearly a gifted programmer – writing an entire operating system is no small feat – and it was sad to see him affected by his mental illness. I mourn his passing, and I wish his family and friends all the strength they need in these trying times. His family and friends are asking people to donate to “organizations working to ease the pain and suffering caused by mental illness”, such as The Brain & Behaviour Research Foundation or the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
I hope he found peace – wherever he may be.
Are you absolutely sure? The reddit thread from a quick google search still says unconfirmed. Incredibly sad if true, the man was a genius and some of his rants were composed of undilluted, hard truth.
The TempleOS page says it’s true.
http://www.templeos.org
Not sure his homepage can be trusted – for example, making up his own death probably wouldn’t be the weirdest thing he did… But I suppose it’s confirmed now. :/
Too bad how he ended up. :/ I mean, in the past people with similar conditions would often be hailed as prophets, or shamans, or mystics…
Or plain brain dead suckers : https://metro.co.uk/2018/06/07/couple-lose-custody-of-child-after-us…
As far as religions go, that’s not too odd
I have lurked on this website close to 10+ years now and i had to make an account just for this. I have never been more gobsmacked by a comment than yours. What hard truths did Terry Davis have? Was it that the NSA was listening to his words and that his operating system was god? Was it that his race rantings and calling everyone he disagreed with the N word? Maybe it was the fact that so many people excuse rampant insanity and racism with it because hey look at this amazing thing he did that served no real purpose but to compound a very very very sick man’s sickness. A man who refused to take medication and was on public assistance because of his lack of self care. Not only that but that people looked up to him because they though he was some sort of prophet or “redpill” truths. Seriously this man was a sad sad man and its better for him and the world that he no longer is ranting to the world and somehow gaining a open eared audience.
I think it would be best for everyone if you’d go back to lurking.
Agreed, he didn’t tell any hard truths or very little truth at all. But I think most rational people would have wished that his abusive behavior could have come at the hands of a mental healing rather than his death.
Treatment can work, but its such an odd individualized disease. Medications that work great for years, can suddenly stop working, finding a drug that is effective can take years..
The TempleOS Wikipedia page was also updated with a paragraph about Terry’s life and cause of death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS
Fuck, man. I really hope suicide wasn’t on his mind.
Strange as he seems, there is a profound beauty in how he put so much effort into giving what he saw as the best to others.
Edited 2018-09-08 04:36 UTC
Wrong. He don’t see it as the best for others.
Read the Wikipedia article for it.
ThempleOS needs a x86_64 Computer.
It have a nice shell and so on.
But it is limited to 640×480 pixels with 16 colors, because God says him, that the OS should have that limitations. There is no technical reason in modern times to have not more colors. That’s the CGA color range.
He have written the OS in 9 years with its own C-dialect (holyC) as interpreter and so on.
So you can see, that he was a very talented developer.
It is sad, that God don’t say to him to work on Linux, Haiku or ReactOS to create the best and usefull Operating System ever. Instead of that God says to him, to create an Operating System with limitations (resolution, colors, no network, …). An Operating System which have and will be having a user-base near or exactly zero.
You’re missing Dasher42’s sentiment. The beauty of human willpower and motivation often has very little to do with the sense or practical usability of the outcome of the endeavor.
I’m referring more to his biography where there were times that he gave every dollar he had to poorer people than himself.
All of this, and what you’re mentioning too, does reflect a warped cognition, but sometimes, the quality of a mentally ill person’s heart comes through all the crazy.
But it also said that he used TempleOS to surf the internet. How is that possible without network support?
Where does it say that he used TempleOS to surf the internet?
TempleOS is meant as a development environment with ultimate control for a single user, absolutely unqualified to connect to the outside world with other users. I am assuming he used Linux/Windows to browse the web for research/fun/communication
Uhm, he wrote it all himself. Its not at all clear that the version he released was the version he himself used. I’m not saying that he did, but I’m also saying its not impossible that he did.
You seem to fundamentally misunderstand its purpose and reason for being. Yeah “God” told him to write and design it in a certain way, but even his god has a certain underlying logic, it wasn’t just random arbitrary decisions. Fundamentally he was trying to create an operating system and environment where you could learn and experiment with writing operating systems and other low level code in a live environment. He was trying to give to a modern audience what people in the 80s and prior had with the C64 and its predecessors, where this kind of thing wasn’t limited to the ‘professionals’ or super programmers but your average person. Projects like Linux, ReactOS, or Haiku are completely unsuited for this task. They are too massive, too advanced and complex for even most programmers, forget about someone just now beginning to dip their toes in the water.
Haiku has quite speedy software rendering without such drastic measures…
I can’t exactly blow my nose on the Mona Lisa. That serves very little purpose yet people have admired it for hundreds of years
I see no beauty in madness like his. I just see fear and heartache and a depressing fact people worshiped him for his mentally ill and racist derived rantings.
I see people like you to be orders of magnitude more dangerous than this poor sick person.
Nobody is or was “worshiping” him.
Stop perpetuating the stigma and abuse mental health patients have to endure. Your concern trolling is far from enlightened, is downright medieval… ironically.
I exchanged some mails with him, he was quite elaborate but clearly was always on the defensive like he couldn’t sustain criticism, even if constructive. That he fathered LoseThos (at the time we exchanged) was one thing and I could understand he was “protective”, but then as he started to rant on here with dubious claims, I put some distance. Sad but on a positive note he lived his dream fully until the end.
I remember this; Terry had submitted a article like any other and I had raised the question if we were going to do anything with the other editors. Naturally, they had wiped their hands clean of Terry due to major issues with his commenting on previous stories. Nobody is going to deny that Terry could devolve into a massive racist and hostile person.
I’m going to share with you some e-mail exchanges with Terry at the time, including his feedback on the article mentioned; these will be in replies, due to post-length limits.
I still read OSNews every day and it is my default go-to place for tech news. I wish I could participate more but I went off the radar when I got married, and now I have a disabled child with around-the-clock needs.
I have a history of schizophrenia in my family, my father had it and I have seen it consume other relatives. I myself have not been afflicted yet probably in part to my own late diagnosis of ASD a couple of years ago; my son is autistic and that lead to my diagnosis.
I always understood how Terry might feel, underneath the confusion, anger, hostility and the deflection. Perhaps that’s why I was willing to look beyond that and discuss TempleOS (then Losethos) purely on technical merits.
In 2008 I was undertaking a complete top-to-bottom redesign of OSNews; admittedly biting off far more than I could chew, given my unstable mental state, but it’s work that I’m still deeply proud of and representative of my love for OSNews. I’m hoping that the screenshots I have of the various work-in-progress bits can be published at some point if the OSNews staff would want to do that.
With that, I bid you adieu.
Edited 2018-09-08 09:00 UTC
Terry’s response to the article:
I must react Kroc. I have worked with ASD.
The “normal” people must learn that, facing what they call a “peculiar person” is, just a person out of our own conventions.
In my company, I had the chance to work in a small team of developers composed of 8 “normal” persons, two diagnosed ASD and a deaf.
It turns out rapidly that the first ASD was very powerful at repetitive tasks and, I gave him the sources configuration management. Build, packaging, delivery note and other Q&A borrowing tasks were always on time. With a high quality process. He never did a mistake.
The second ASD was more problematic : A kind of pissing code robot, providing you 18K lines of SLOC/day without any social interaction. Just gave him a specifications book input, and request that the code must compile before his delivery. Because he preferred to discuss with a gcc output than a human being. Not more, no team meeting, no discussion possible about his code. Nothing else than coding.
The deaf person turns out to be very strong at concentrating in the noisy computers tests rooms. So he was very good at debug and patch, the code of the second ASD… And I learned sign language to communicate with him through windows (Not Windows(R)). A kind of crypto-communication through air, at distance : Priceless.
Nine months… The whole team was awarded by the company for its performances and, its capacity to deliver complex embedded software on time, with high quality and customer satisfaction.
This is the proof if, “normal” people can open their mind, adapt to “peculiar” others”, and pass out their own conventions, we can find the real power of “peculiar” people.
And, when you find this power… It’s always amazing to ordinary people.
Terry was probably the kind of particular person very difficult to understand for a conventional one.
But you Kroc, got the chance to see the good part of Terry Davis, and understand why it may worth it.
A “peculiar” person to understand another very peculiar person… Again, I got a lesson as an ordinary person.
Definitely. “Non-normal” people are a great source to learn from. Prople with “normal” minds often cannot imagine to leave the predefined ways, which stops them from acquiring a different point of view toward a a problem, and that makes it impossible for them to see a better solution.
It seems it didn’t occur to him that “commanded by god” characteristics of his OS made it rather uninteresting…
Kroc,
I hope you find good professional advice to take care of your child and help for your own struggles. Our brain is really, really complex and many things affect its capacity to work “properly”.
I had on uncle and still have 2 cousins that display mental disabilities at some level. Find a good doctor and if he/she prescribes some medicine, take. Also, have friends and go out with them, fight against self-isolation and/or the impulse to deal with your problems only by yourself.
Best regards.
Happy to see you here again
You too, always!
Temple OS is like a C Machine. There is a purity there.
so, a PDP-11
Shine On You crazy Diamond
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is a train…
His name was Dan. He was a coder, like me. He wasn’t full-on schizophrenic; instead, he had schizophreniform disorder, in which the disease manifested episodically.
He’d shown signs that his perception of the world wasn’t “normal” since childhood. The first full-blown instance was a result of someone putting PCP, a.k.a. “angel dust,” in his drink at a party. (The perp went to prison for it.) Over the next week, Dan suffered some wild hallucinations, mood swings, and obsessive-compulsive behavior. When all other options were exhausted, his parents had him committed to a reputable mental hospital, where the goal was treatment, not isolation. Eight months later, he was stable enough for release, although he still wasn’t normal by any measure.
Regarding his illness, he always answered any questions I had, honestly & directly. He described the symptoms of a schizophrenic as the inability to distinguish between sensory perceptions and the bubblings of the subconscious mind, when drugs aren’t involved. His own case was latent, before his drugged drink at that party. After that, he had to learn nothing less than a new way of life.
I asked him to describe an incident that best illustrated what it’s like for him, to explain it to someone with a “normal” (i.e. normally cognitive) mind. He told me this story.
Fifteen years after that episode, as he was telling me about it, his narration was totally calm, even finding humor in small points that the rest of us take for granted. But he had accepted his situation.
His hospital regimen boiled down to a few basic points:
— avoiding excess stress
— recoginizing the onset of an episode
— learning how to remind himself, in an episode, that it will end eventually
— learning how to spot the tricks a schizophrenic mind imposes on sensory perceptions
One of the things he learned later, was how to deal with employers who had to deal with his week-long absences a few times per year. When he was my colleague, the project management team all knew, but it wasn’t always the case with other employers.
His last job was, naturally, computer programming. In April 2003, he took his own life in a schizophrenic rage. His bosses attended his funeral, paying final respects to a fatally-flawed genius.
The next day, I went by to thank them for their actions. The CEO knew I was his friend, so she asked me directly if I had any clue why he killed himself.
They didn’t know that Dan had a mental illness.
As his friend, I know he trusted me not to damage his reputation or employability, but he also trusted my judgment when it came to talking about his condition. With nothing more to lose for anyone, I spoke candidly with the CEO and COO about the challenges Dan faced, about how he sometimes had to take off a week or two from office work. They knew Dan took some personal time off now and then, but they had no idea that he sometimes couldn’t distinguish reality and fantasy.
——-
Many illnesses are hidden from most of us, until suddenly the symptoms become visible. Some are physical, like hypothyroidism, lupus, or diabetes. Some are mental, like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. And some are both, like any addiction, even like self-harm.
As people live their lives, they adapt to the challenges they face. The mentally ill do the same, to varying degrees of success. Dan’s was the rare case of mental illness that didn’t require long-term drugs. He found a balanced state of mind through training and meditation, which let him live a life that “passed for normal.” The journey he took to that place was long and very difficult.
In the end, he fell off the mental cliff. But that ledge he walked was far longer than most of us understood, before he died.
——-
Back to the topic: I remember Kroc Kamen’s original posting about LoseThos, how it held my interest, from beginning to end, including the video. My friendship with Dan helped me to see how Terry Davis was a similar flawed genius, but more finely cut. Kamen said LoseThos was a “hobby,” but Davis’s video (or rather, audio) revealed to me a desperation for an audience. It’s a symptom of paranoia, which often accompanies schizophrenia: the sense that nobody else understands what you see, and you’re afraid to attempt an explanation because you know someone is coming to take you away; when a receptive audience finally shows up, they get a flood of explanation, along with gratitude for being willing to listen.
Terry Davis’s illness wasn’t his fault, any more than Dan’s was his fault. But in Dan’s life, he brought blessing to lots of people, directly and indirectly, and usually through totally screwed-up humor.
Terry Davis might now be an unsung genius (or little-sung genius), but these tiny ripples he made in life can have some far-reaching effects. The pure drive someone needs, to put plain text font and 3D-rendered graphics on a 640x480x16 VGA screen, using cooperative multitasking? A JIT compiler using C syntax? At God’s command?
I just turned 50, but I may yet live to see any of Terry Davis’s “crazy” ideas get incorporated into BSD/*nix/MacOS or even Microsoft Windows Hudson Bay version 0x0f. Maybe not in their original forms (particularly, “at God’s command”), but only time can tell what gems TempleOS holds for the rest of us.
——-
As a postscript: Dan was adopted as an infant. Before he died, he contacted his birth mother, who pointed out some interesting things. He had three half-siblings, who shared some interesting traits with him:
— All were geniuses but one (a sub-genius)
— All but one of them were heavy smokers
In the “nature vs. nurture” argument about mental development, it was definitely an eye-opener for me.
Thank you for sharing this… quite moving, and definitively scratched some old memories. Thanks.
Thanks for sharing.
73 years after a very dark period in humanity history, intolerance and indifference is spreading once again on our little blue dot. Stories like yours at least keep my hope in humanity alive.
Best regards.
One afternoon, he and I were among friends, when the conversation steered to a documentary about the atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombs carried the nicknames “Fat Man” and “Little Boy”, respectively.
Dan had never heard those names, so he didn’t really understand what they referred to. Once I explained the names to him, he began to laugh helplessly. The only reference-point he had for such silly names came from the Saturday morning cartoon “Fat Albert,” so he thought “Fat Man & Little Boy” might be another kids’ animation.
That silly mistake led to so much more humor:
Little Boy: “Say, Fat Man?”
Fat Man: “Yes, Little Boy?”
LB: “What’re we gonna do today?”
FM: “We’re going to protect world peace!”
LB: “How are we gonna do that?”
FM: “By blowing up everyone who disagrees with us!”
Soon after, Dan even came up with a fantastic jingle for the cartoon:
FM: “I’m Fat Man!”
LB: “I’m Little Boy!”
Both: “We’re a Nuclear Famil-eeeee!”
After he sang that jingle, I was literally doubled over on the floor, laughing so hard I couldn’t speak. So were two other friends. Dan’s screwed-up humor took the rest of us into a silly place, where nobody else thought to go.
Mental illness is a sad burden to bear, but every case has its own points to laugh about.
TempleOS Hymn Risen Piano Cover – In Honor Of Terry Davis – By David Eddy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY33uoBSw3w
Anyone seen his video? He was extremely racist and misogyny was his second hobby – please don’t invoke his illness as an excuse. Interesting guy, but hardly a nice guy.
Mental illness is not an ‘excuse’. What next, condemn a person with Tourette’s?
Holding a schizophrenic responsible for not having an agreeable personality is like blaming a paraplegic for not picking up their trash.
There is so much stigma and ignorance around mental illness in this world still… ugh.
So I happen to know Schizophrenia very well, my dad suffered from it and we did a lot of research during the early stages. One effect of the disease is that it *amplifies* your personality traits. Schizophrenia doesn’t make you a racist, it makes you express it in clear terms.
I actually do happen to have a close member of my family who suffered from this disease as well.
Schizophrenia in males is almost exclusively expressed in late teens very early twenties.
Their actions/opinions are shaped by their severely affected/compromised cognitive processes, holding them personally responsible is part of the perpetuation of the stigma and abuse many mental health patients have to endure.
You’re not supposed to take personally something that a mentally ill person says. They need an environment that is compassionate enough to understand the very basic truth that the brain is just another organ and as such prone to disease.
We shouldn’t take the racist rants of a schizophrenic personally just as we should not be offended because a paraplegic failed to qualify for a marathon.
This is why zero tolerance PC concern trolling bullshit is dangerous, because it can victimize those who literally need to be given a free pass.
Edited 2018-09-10 22:11 UTC
What about when the affected refuses to medicate? (though I suppose that’s mostly a failure of the US healthcare system…)
What about it?
A sick brain, which is what people suffering mental health issues, in many cases is not going to be able to make reasonable choices because it’s perception and cognitive processes may be severely compromised.
One of the reasons why mental health is so prone to stigma is because mental diseases are “invisible,” unlie other more obvious illnesses; we can see clearly when a person has a broken leg, but a broken mind does not look that different from a healthy one so it is hard to accept that the behavior of a mentally ill person are the manifestations and symptoms of their illness.
Yes, why I suggested it’s the failure of healthcare system if such people are allowed to go untreated… but is forcing them the right way?
Given that the brain has to decide to treat itself, that is not dissimilar to someone with two broken legs who can’t walk to A&E to get them set.
So you’re of the opinion someone should “help” them decide?…
Terry Davis was a complete prick. He did very little for computer science or theology. RIP, but I can’t honestly say that I’m empathetic toward this racist, misogynist.
Edit here…
Let me back up. Mental illness is very treatable in most cases. His family, friends (if he had any), colleagues, members of the church, local law enforcement, must have been extremely apathetic toward what this dangerous man without treatment could have done. As mental illness took a brilliant mind in Ian Murdock just not too long ago, I believe it would be a duty to society to encourage people to seek mental illness.
I honestly thought that Davis would end up murdering people, honestly.
Edited 2018-09-10 00:26 UTC
It’s hard to tell if you’re trolling or you really are that ignorant about the reality of mental illness. Good grief.
So while he was still alive, he was a hated troll. So hated that he was banned. Basically, everyone told him to go the f**k away and stop bothering us.
But now that he is dead, suddenly we all are very saaaad, we express our condolences and even respect, we even go as far as to say he was “a genius”…
And don’t forget to be “politically correct” because of his mental illness.
You people are ridiculous…
source: http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/
Edited 2018-09-10 07:59 UTC
I am referring to Thom and other commentators like him who suddenly turned their attitude 180 degrees just because that schizophrenic died.
It is nauseating to see people suddenly praising someone they once mocked just because that someone died.
No one ever told as many good words about him while he was still alive and could actually READ those words.
Other than us (i.e., Kroc) actually helping him by giving him an article slot?
From http://www.osnews.com/permalink?662134 it seems you, OSNews, wouldn’t if it were up to you, Thom…
(and I would probably agree…)
The fact that you refer to him purely as “that schizophrenic” on OSnews pretty much sums up how black-and-white your thinking is!
Edited 2018-09-10 12:26 UTC
OK, teach me, please, about how references work.
Teach me about how did you know what exactly I referenced by “we” and “us”.
1) First you mention something clearly
2) Then you refer to that with a simple referral word (like I just did with that)
a) You don’t mention something, then something else and then refer to the first something because it is confusing
b) You don’t mention something and then refer to it but mean a variation because that is confusing
You failed several times on both the clearly part of 1) and the variation part of b)
You did succeed at the “that schizophrenic” referral, which I pointed out as the clearest sign of black-and-white thinking that you showed and which you never responded to.
So no problem if you need more help grammar, but maybe you can work on your other skills as a human being as well? /s
Don’t you know? You’re talking to the self-appointed gatekeeper of English on OSNews! He takes it as a personal insult if people don’t use proper English at him. So he’s actually trying to insult you by being unable to communicate in proper English.
And what about cooling down a bit on Terry’s grave ?
Listen to the words ….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_A2yvxNY_M
Sweet liturgical chants…
I just thought I’d point out that he said LoseTheOS is not an operating system.
It is more like a multithreaded application running directly on the computer.