7 ms·

I have the impression that this project gets so much attention because of its author's idiosyncrasy, not despite of it. Was it created by a non-racist, mentall

by soneca 10y ago

I have the impression that this project gets so much attention because of its author's idiosyncrasy, not despite of it. Was it created by a non-racist, mentally-healthy, socially apt individual wouldn't it be regarded as a neat but not extra-ordinary hobby project? I believe it would not be so frequently a topic at HN front page. But I would like to hear others opinions on this.

gravypod 10y ago
I think you're describing Urbit. The creator is strange but not that strange in the grand scheme of things and yet Urbit still has a user base. TempleOS does some really cool things. JITed C derivative, unified terminal/texteditor/documentation, and a lot of other cool things. Just because Terry is "different" doesn't mean his work is any less valuable. More people may see it because of his "antics" but there are still cool things he has done.
untog 10y ago
Agreed. I've read more about TempleOS that pretty much any other homebrewed OS on HN. It is sort of interesting, but not as much as it is written about. And "it boots so much faster than Windows" type comparisons are uninspired. Of course it does, it does barely anything by comparison.
- throwaway91111 10y ago
  Most people don't give it justice--it's supposed to bring the C64 experience to x86-64 cores.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >And "it boots so much faster than Windows" type comparisons are uninspired. Of course it does, it does barely anything by comparison. Well, there are apps with thousands of users, based on Electron and NW.js, that do "barely anything" and yet load slowly as molasses and use half your CPU. What's Slack doing compared to a full (if primitive) OS and userland?
  - staticassertion 10y ago
    > What's Slack doing compared to a full (if primitive) OS and userland? Connecting to the internet.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      Who'd new a few network sockets (support for which the TempleOS guy could write in his sleep his one hand tied) were such CPU beasts...
      - staticassertion 10y ago
        Who said anything about CPU? Slack's going to make DNS requests, multiple TCP requests most likely. That's network IO, multiple orders of magnitude slower than reading from disk - which is (at most, it may just read small file from disk and unpack in memory - I don't know) what TempleOS does. Slack's app has to display images, render scrolling, respond to network events, store and load application state like your preferences and theme, etc. Assuming it does these things - I use the web client. Slack also has to support multiple operating systems, so it may make technology choices around that. It's really not hard at all to see why Slack would be much slower than an OS that basically does nothing to boot up. It's not hard at all to see why Windows, which supports tons of hardware, would be larger on disk and slower to unpack as it boots - lots of drivers and services need to start up to support all of the things that make it not TempleOS.
        coldtea 10y ago
        >It's really not hard at all to see why Slack would be much slower than an OS that basically does nothing to boot up. You seem to underestimate what TempleOS does and overestimate what Slack does. We had apps 10x more complex than Slack (with network IO et all) in 1995 -- and they run faster. Now using the web stack for Slack desktop might very well be a business decision (and a good one at that), but it's one of the worst performance decisions you can make.
- DanBC 10y ago
  What other homebrewed OS projects exist?
ebbv 10y ago
It's also because he creates lots of fake accounts on HN and Reddit and other places to try to get attention. Moderators are unfortunately too nice in this instance and tolerate his baloney.
flohrian 10y ago
>> [...] neat but not extra-ordinary hobby project. IMO TempleOS is quite extra-ordinary! From the article's conclusion: "Watching TempleOS execute its built-in test suite is a jaw-dropping experience. I can't help but be impressed as a vast number of demos, games, graphing calculators, debuggers, and compilers all fly before your eyes. To see the sheer amount of content that's been written here over the years, to see such effort expended on a labor of love, is wonderfully heart-warming."
hapless 10y ago
Back when the author took his medication more regularly, the project was called "LoseTheOS" and it was similarly popular for its interesting features. Terry's online behavior has grown increasingly odd, but he project's fame pre-dates the odd behavior
- microcolonel 10y ago
  I had a conversation over IRC with Terry when it was still called LoseThos, I think he got pretty frustrated when I told him I didn't trust the OS image enough to run it in a VM. Lo and behold, he has had the source code up since renaming it, AFAIK.
  - 77pt77 10y ago
    > I didn't trust the OS image enough to run it in a VM That's some serious paranoia there.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 10y ago
      In fairness, VM escapes are found with some regularity.
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      It's not trustworthy unless it's physical separation on a dedicated, energy-gapped device. That's Clive Robinson's term for having as much matter and energy isolation as possible to prevent known and unknown side channels. Anything less will get hacks and leaks.
- Y_Y 10y ago
  He seems to stream himself a lot recently (he's even on now - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEwmiplwGLI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEwmiplwGLI ). He just browses the internet and he sent some viewers money. It's pretty surreal.
  - i336_ 10y ago
brudgers 10y ago
Davis is a member of the Hacker News community in the strong sense of community, but the project gets attention on HN because it is intellectually interesting and an awesome accomplishment. It is common for people to look at a creative work and say/think "Phftt...I could do that." The proof that a person is mistaken is that they don't and won't and never will.
KboPAacDA3 10y ago
I feel the coverage of TempleOS/SparrowOS/LoseThos has had to be a balancing act. Single articles will appear on various blogs, but not much more. The OSDev forums seem to quietly ignore TempleOS because Terry has a reputation of posting to the forums, and his input devolves into divining God's words from random text. Terry will post level-headed answers about OS architecture, then within a few hours it's After Egypt 24/7. Terry ends up becoming shadowbanned on discussing his own project. I wish the OSDev community could have a more constructive dialog with Terry and his project.
lemming 10y ago
You're undoubtedly correct that this project gets more attention because of Terry. But I find it difficult to believe that anyone would not find it a pretty extraordinary project.
epigramx 10y ago
It's certainly a current meme on /g/ exactly for that reason.
FoxotCW 10y ago
No mentally-healthy, socially apt individual would devote much of his life to turning the PS2/AMD64 architecture into a 64-bit Commodore 64 optimized for glorifying and communing with God. TempleOS is a vision of what computing might have been like if the middle ages never ended. What if computing technology developed in a monastery for the purpose of glorifying God? (Like illuminated manuscripts and sacred architecture.) We'd expect odd mixtures of the archaic and innovative, weird technological taboos and lots of anachronisms that only made sense theologically. Something like TempleOS.
- username223 10y ago
  This is a stretch, but bear with me. Don Knuth saw that typesetting was being done wrong, and spent decades doing it right in his own idiosyncratic way, creating TeX. Terry Davis did the same with operating systems, creating TempleOS. Knuth's is the forgiving New Testament faith, while Davis's is the vengeful, capricious Old Testament one, but they were both driven by a personal faith and genius. Knuth's obsession was rewarded by society, while Davis's was scorned. Neither did any real harm.
danial 10y ago
I don't know if it's extraordinary, but it's definitely interesting. He wrote it in HolyC language which is an interesting project on its own: http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Doc/HolyC.html http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Doc/HolyC.html. You can change the OS because of the JIT compiler, run the compiler, and overwrite the running OS. The command line is interesting. It feeds directly into a JIT compiler, so you have things like Cd(".."). It runs in a single memory space, so processes communicate with each other by writing to each others memory space. It's built by one person without feedback or collaboration with others. There are code walk throughs available that you can learn from: http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Home/Web/TOSVideos.html http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Home/Web/TOSVideos.html
aaron695 10y ago
> Was it created by a non-racist It has been mentioned before, but unless you want to back this up, it's not necessarily true. He'll say the word nigger and other 'words' the current western centric population don't like, but I yet to see them in a context other than he doesn't conform to societies rules about what words are acceptable. IE I havn't heard him consistently (or ever) say a certain race is less deserving of heaven or anything else than another, but happy to be proven wrong?

by soneca 10y ago

gravypod 10y ago

I think you're describing Urbit. The creator is strange but not that strange in the grand scheme of things and yet Urbit still has a user base. TempleOS does some really cool things. JITed C derivative, unified terminal/texteditor/documentation, and a lot of other cool things. Just because Terry is "different" doesn't mean his work is any less valuable. More people may see it because of his "antics" but there are still cool things he has done.

untog 10y ago

Agreed. I've read more about TempleOS that pretty much any other homebrewed OS on HN. It is sort of interesting, but not as much as it is written about. And "it boots so much faster than Windows" type comparisons are uninspired. Of course it does, it does barely anything by comparison.

throwaway91111 10y ago
Most people don't give it justice--it's supposed to bring the C64 experience to x86-64 cores.
coldtea 10y ago
>And "it boots so much faster than Windows" type comparisons are uninspired. Of course it does, it does barely anything by comparison. Well, there are apps with thousands of users, based on Electron and NW.js, that do "barely anything" and yet load slowly as molasses and use half your CPU. What's Slack doing compared to a full (if primitive) OS and userland?
- staticassertion 10y ago
  > What's Slack doing compared to a full (if primitive) OS and userland? Connecting to the internet.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    Who'd new a few network sockets (support for which the TempleOS guy could write in his sleep his one hand tied) were such CPU beasts...
    - staticassertion 10y ago
      Who said anything about CPU? Slack's going to make DNS requests, multiple TCP requests most likely. That's network IO, multiple orders of magnitude slower than reading from disk - which is (at most, it may just read small file from disk and unpack in memory - I don't know) what TempleOS does. Slack's app has to display images, render scrolling, respond to network events, store and load application state like your preferences and theme, etc. Assuming it does these things - I use the web client. Slack also has to support multiple operating systems, so it may make technology choices around that. It's really not hard at all to see why Slack would be much slower than an OS that basically does nothing to boot up. It's not hard at all to see why Windows, which supports tons of hardware, would be larger on disk and slower to unpack as it boots - lots of drivers and services need to start up to support all of the things that make it not TempleOS.
      - coldtea 10y ago
        >It's really not hard at all to see why Slack would be much slower than an OS that basically does nothing to boot up. You seem to underestimate what TempleOS does and overestimate what Slack does. We had apps 10x more complex than Slack (with network IO et all) in 1995 -- and they run faster. Now using the web stack for Slack desktop might very well be a business decision (and a good one at that), but it's one of the worst performance decisions you can make.
DanBC 10y ago
What other homebrewed OS projects exist?

ebbv 10y ago

It's also because he creates lots of fake accounts on HN and Reddit and other places to try to get attention. Moderators are unfortunately too nice in this instance and tolerate his baloney.

flohrian 10y ago

>> [...] neat but not extra-ordinary hobby project. IMO TempleOS is quite extra-ordinary! From the article's conclusion: "Watching TempleOS execute its built-in test suite is a jaw-dropping experience. I can't help but be impressed as a vast number of demos, games, graphing calculators, debuggers, and compilers all fly before your eyes. To see the sheer amount of content that's been written here over the years, to see such effort expended on a labor of love, is wonderfully heart-warming."

hapless 10y ago

Back when the author took his medication more regularly, the project was called "LoseTheOS" and it was similarly popular for its interesting features. Terry's online behavior has grown increasingly odd, but he project's fame pre-dates the odd behavior

microcolonel 10y ago
I had a conversation over IRC with Terry when it was still called LoseThos, I think he got pretty frustrated when I told him I didn't trust the OS image enough to run it in a VM. Lo and behold, he has had the source code up since renaming it, AFAIK.
- 77pt77 10y ago
  > I didn't trust the OS image enough to run it in a VM That's some serious paranoia there.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 10y ago
    In fairness, VM escapes are found with some regularity.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    It's not trustworthy unless it's physical separation on a dedicated, energy-gapped device. That's Clive Robinson's term for having as much matter and energy isolation as possible to prevent known and unknown side channels. Anything less will get hacks and leaks.
Y_Y 10y ago
He seems to stream himself a lot recently (he's even on now - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEwmiplwGLI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEwmiplwGLI ). He just browses the internet and he sent some viewers money. It's pretty surreal.
- i336_ 10y ago

brudgers 10y ago

Davis is a member of the Hacker News community in the strong sense of community, but the project gets attention on HN because it is intellectually interesting and an awesome accomplishment. It is common for people to look at a creative work and say/think "Phftt...I could do that." The proof that a person is mistaken is that they don't and won't and never will.

KboPAacDA3 10y ago

I feel the coverage of TempleOS/SparrowOS/LoseThos has had to be a balancing act. Single articles will appear on various blogs, but not much more. The OSDev forums seem to quietly ignore TempleOS because Terry has a reputation of posting to the forums, and his input devolves into divining God's words from random text. Terry will post level-headed answers about OS architecture, then within a few hours it's After Egypt 24/7. Terry ends up becoming shadowbanned on discussing his own project. I wish the OSDev community could have a more constructive dialog with Terry and his project.

lemming 10y ago

You're undoubtedly correct that this project gets more attention because of Terry. But I find it difficult to believe that anyone would not find it a pretty extraordinary project.

epigramx 10y ago

It's certainly a current meme on /g/ exactly for that reason.

FoxotCW 10y ago

No mentally-healthy, socially apt individual would devote much of his life to turning the PS2/AMD64 architecture into a 64-bit Commodore 64 optimized for glorifying and communing with God. TempleOS is a vision of what computing might have been like if the middle ages never ended. What if computing technology developed in a monastery for the purpose of glorifying God? (Like illuminated manuscripts and sacred architecture.) We'd expect odd mixtures of the archaic and innovative, weird technological taboos and lots of anachronisms that only made sense theologically. Something like TempleOS.

username223 10y ago
This is a stretch, but bear with me. Don Knuth saw that typesetting was being done wrong, and spent decades doing it right in his own idiosyncratic way, creating TeX. Terry Davis did the same with operating systems, creating TempleOS. Knuth's is the forgiving New Testament faith, while Davis's is the vengeful, capricious Old Testament one, but they were both driven by a personal faith and genius. Knuth's obsession was rewarded by society, while Davis's was scorned. Neither did any real harm.

danial 10y ago

I don't know if it's extraordinary, but it's definitely interesting. He wrote it in HolyC language which is an interesting project on its own: http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Doc/HolyC.html http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Doc/HolyC.html. You can change the OS because of the JIT compiler, run the compiler, and overwrite the running OS. The command line is interesting. It feeds directly into a JIT compiler, so you have things like Cd(".."). It runs in a single memory space, so processes communicate with each other by writing to each others memory space. It's built by one person without feedback or collaboration with others. There are code walk throughs available that you can learn from: http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Home/Web/TOSVideos.html http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Home/Web/TOSVideos.html

aaron695 10y ago

> Was it created by a non-racist It has been mentioned before, but unless you want to back this up, it's not necessarily true. He'll say the word nigger and other 'words' the current western centric population don't like, but I yet to see them in a context other than he doesn't conform to societies rules about what words are acceptable. IE I havn't heard him consistently (or ever) say a certain race is less deserving of heaven or anything else than another, but happy to be proven wrong?