Submitted by When a homeless man was accidentally killed by a train on the 11/08/18 in The Dalles, Oregon, no one realised how many people it would effect. The man was a computer programmer called Terry Davis and he was on a mission from God.
He’d designed an entire operating system called Temple OS and according to Terry its creation had been a direct instruction from God himself. As a fellow programmer explained it, ‘you can imagine how over time one man might build a house, but this is like building a sky scraper, on your own!’ And this was all done while Terry battled a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
Aleks Krotoski searches the emails, web posts and live streams to piece together the life of a remarkable individual who’s work touched so many and is now celebrated not just as a technological achievement but an artistic one.
Davis’ story was a sad one, and partially intertwined with OSNews and the crew here. His behaviour meant we eventually had to ban him from the site, but even after that, then-OSNews editor Kroc Kamen worked with him for an OSNews article.
What was the J in J OS?
Jesus?
I found Kroc’s article on TempleOS and the other articles about it on OSnews interesting at the time. One of the reasons I love OSnews is that it takes alternative OSes seriously in a way I don’t expect to see in the mainstream media, so as a long-time listener of The Digital Human as well, it’s unexpected to see them overlap.
Unsurprisingly there’s no real technical detail on The Digital Human, but I thought it did a good job of placing TempleOS into a broader context.