Inactive Terry A. Davis / Terrence Andrew Davis - Creator of TempleOS (formerly LoseThos/sparrowOS)

Feline Darkmage said:
He, like Chloe Sagal before him, definitely could have gone to great successes if they weren't held back by severe mental issues. I can only hope on top of leaving behind a meme legacy of Glow-in-the-Dark Central Intelligence African-Americans and realistic elephants, he gets recognized as one of the greats.
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He didn't just have the potential to reach great success, he outright reached it. Not only with being one of the guys behind Ticketmaster, but also with the fact that in the space of ten years one man created, released, and maintained a fully functioning, stable operating system (which has taken the hundreds of contributors to ReactOS since 1996 to do, and they're not even done yet), a programming language and compiler for it made completely by hand from assembly, and did it all with a noble purpose (whether that be the will of God or an attempt to bring back the Eighties spirit of self-reliance and technical mastery to all computer users, not just programmers), all while amassing huge, unprecedented amounts of public support and daring to defy tradition in the name of his own principles all the while. Terry's honestly in my pantheon of personal heroes among the likes of Alvin Weinberg and Barry Goldwater.
 
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Trans-istor said:
He didn't just have the potential to reach great success, he outright reached it. Not only with being one of the guys behind Ticketmaster, but also with the fact that in the space of ten years one man created, released, and maintained a fully functioning, stable operating system, a programming language and compiler for it made completely by hand from assembly, and did it all with a noble purpose (whether that be the will of God or an attempt to bring back the Eighties spirit of self-reliance and technical mastery to all computer users, not just programmers), all while amassing huge, unprecedented amounts of public support and daring to defy tradition in the name of his own principles all the while. Terry's honestly in my pantheon of personal heroes among the likes of Alvin Weinberg and Barry Goldwater.
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I feel it would be better to compare him to Emperor Norton, King of America; a man who lived by his own laws and beliefs regardless of the ridicule of others. They probably also used the word "nigger" about the same number of times.
 
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Senior Lexmechanic said:
I feel it would be better to compare him to Emperor Norton, King of America; a man who lived by his own laws and beliefs regardless of the ridicule of others. They probably also used the word "nigger" about the same number of times.
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Thanks for reminding me about the Emperor, I completely forgot about him but now that I remember I'll have to induct him in sometime.
 
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Trans-istor said:
He didn't just have the potential to reach great success, he outright reached it. Not only with being one of the guys behind Ticketmaster, but also with the fact that in the space of ten years one man created, released, and maintained a fully functioning, stable operating system (which has taken the hundreds of contributors to ReactOS since 1996 to do, and they're not even done yet), a programming language and compiler for it made completely by hand from assembly, and did it all with a noble purpose (whether that be the will of God or an attempt to bring back the Eighties spirit of self-reliance and technical mastery to all computer users, not just programmers), all while amassing huge, unprecedented amounts of public support and daring to defy tradition in the name of his own principles all the while. Terry's honestly in my pantheon of personal heroes among the likes of Alvin Weinberg and Barry Goldwater.
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Okay to clear a few things up, I notice a lot of people are singing praising about TempleOS post-Terry now. It is indeed a feat in itself to create an OS, but people don't seem to even know what TempleOS is when they say these things.
1. TempleOS is not written in Assembly, in fact, it intentionally has not an ounce of Assembly in it. Everything, even the bootloader, is written in HolyC, Terry's dialect of C. The fact that the OS is so heavily based and focused on this language tells me Terry was more of a compiler guy than an OS guy.
2. ReactOS is a re-entrant multitasking clone of Windows NT, the levels of complexity it is above TempleOS is astronomical. Terry specifically stated and engineered TempleOS to be as simple as possible so people can learn from it. Do you know why it can't multitask? Because setting up paging is a pain in the ass. Why does it have such a low resolution and color depth? Because setting that up is fucking dumb in it's own right.

I don't like this faux fawning over his achievements, it cheapens them. People act like they have no idea what Terry did and are just going "Oh wow he made an OS what a cool guy." People just call TempleOS cool without knowing exactly what made it cool, what made it unique, what intentional choices Terry made for it, regardless of their questionability. In fact, TempleOS has a ton of really fucking stupid choices that Terry intentionally made. Why? I have no idea, but that's what I like about TempleOS, he made it intentionally shitty, that was his actual goal. He wanted to make something that was not robust or has a lot of process boilerplate and security features, so people could see how the damn thing even operated at it's core. It has no complexity or safety, it's completely hackable and easy to understand (RedSea is even simpler than FAT32 at the cost of some features).

The point of TempleOS is to be a learning tool, not to be as fancy as any other OS, in fact it's intentionally not as fancy as any other OS. And people completely disregard that and just try to sound sorry about Terry dying by trying to baselessly say how impressive his OS is. It is impressive, but not for the reasons people say it is. This blog post is one of the best ones I've seen about TempleOS because it genuinely looks at some of it's features.

I just kinda wish people could appreciate Terry's achievements for being Terry's achievements and not because they have no idea what his achievements even were.
 
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The Fool said:
Okay to clear a few things up, I notice a lot of people are singing praising about TempleOS post-Terry now. It is indeed a feat in itself to create an OS, but people don't seem to even know what TempleOS is when they say these things.
1. TempleOS is not written in Assembly, in fact, it intentionally has not an ounce of Assembly in it. Everything, even the bootloader, is written in HolyC, Terry's dialect of C. The fact that the OS is so heavily based and focused on this language tells me Terry was more of a compiler guy than an OS guy.
2. ReactOS is a re-entrant multitasking clone of Windows NT, the levels of complexity it is above TempleOS is astronomical. Terry specifically stated and engineered TempleOS to be as simple as possible so people can learn from it. Do you know why it can't multitask? Because setting up paging is a pain in the ass. Why does it have such a low resolution and color depth? Because setting that up is fucking dumb in it's own right.

I don't like this faux fawning over his achievements, it cheapens them. People act like they have no idea what Terry did and are just going "Oh wow he made an OS what a cool guy." People just call TempleOS cool without knowing exactly what made it cool, what made it unique, what intentional choices Terry made for it, regardless of their questionability. In fact, TempleOS has a ton of really fucking stupid choices that Terry intentionally made. Why? I have no idea, but that's what I like about TempleOS, he made it intentionally shitty, that was his actual goal. He wanted to make something that was not robust or has a lot of process boilerplate and security features, so people could see how the damn thing even operated at it's core. It has no complexity or safety, it's completely hackable and easy to understand (RedSea is even simpler than FAT32 at the cost of some features).

The point of TempleOS is to be a learning tool, not to be as fancy as any other OS, in fact it's intentionally not as fancy as any other OS. And people completely disregard that and just try to sound sorry about Terry dying by trying to baselessly say how impressive his OS is. It is impressive, but not for the reasons people say it is. This blog post is one of the best ones I've seen about TempleOS because it genuinely looks at some of it's features.

I just kinda wish people could appreciate Terry's achievements for being Terry's achievements and not because they have no idea what his achievements even were.
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Terry flat out called it a "toy", and he was more than OK with that. There are no real drivers, no networking... it's a beautiful and strange little C64 type OS written in a Terry version of C. It's beautiful in what it does, give you insights into Terry's mind and the ability to get messages from Mister God via the RNG capabilities of the computer.
 
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The Fool said:
Okay to clear a few things up, I notice a lot of people are singing praising about TempleOS post-Terry now. It is indeed a feat in itself to create an OS, but people don't seem to even know what TempleOS is when they say these things.
1. TempleOS is not written in Assembly, in fact, it intentionally has not an ounce of Assembly in it. Everything, even the bootloader, is written in HolyC, Terry's dialect of C. The fact that the OS is so heavily based and focused on this language tells me Terry was more of a compiler guy than an OS guy.
2. ReactOS is a re-entrant multitasking clone of Windows NT, the levels of complexity it is above TempleOS is astronomical. Terry specifically stated and engineered TempleOS to be as simple as possible so people can learn from it. Do you know why it can't multitask? Because setting up paging is a pain in the ass. Why does it have such a low resolution and color depth? Because setting that up is fucking dumb in it's own right
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1. Didn't say it was. He did make HC out of Assembly, though.

2. Other OSes have smaller teams and are made much more quickly, see: every commercial OS, many of the more popular distros; hell, even obscure shit like MorphOS and Haiku reached beta faster than ROS. Even these are done by multiple dedicated people over several years.

3. TempleOS is more of an SDK than an OS and that's what it was trying to be, a launchpad for someone to get really into programming, and I think that deserves praise. Sure, 640x480 or whatever (although even that was done by hand), but at the same time it didn't need anything more.
 
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Trans-istor said:
in the space of ten years one man created, released, and maintained a fully functioning, stable operating system
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@The Fool already went into it in detail, but the point of TempleOS was not to be stable. He specifically envisioned your programs being able to nuke what would be considered "kernel memory" on Afro-American operating systems, and if you screw up you just reboot, start over, and keep experimenting.
 
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Trans-istor said:
Other OSes have smaller teams and are made much more quickly, see: every commercial OS, many of the more popular distros; hell, even obscure shit like MorphOS and Haiku reached beta faster than ROS. Even these are done by multiple dedicated people over several years.
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I don't want to get off-topic but you don't seem to understand how incredibly complex NT is. Any idiot can slap a linux distro together overnight and Haiku is a fairly simple architecture that doesn't seem too concerned with hardware compatibility. I'm honestly impressed ReactOS got anywhere at all, if you pirate NT 4's leaked source and see how many thousands upon thousands of the gigabytes of files it has, and that only being the second version of NT ever released, it's got a fucking lot of work going into it. Not just that but re-implementing DirectX, Driver Foundation, and all the very carefully orchestrated Executive serves is a huge undertaking. And even then, they're going out of their way to implement a few things released in versions of Windows past their target version (MinWin's architecture, extra APIs, etc.)
 
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The Fool said:
I don't want to get off-topic but you don't seem to understand how incredibly complex NT is. Any idiot can slap a linux distro together overnight and Haiku is a fairly simple architecture that doesn't seem too concerned with hardware compatibility. I'm honestly impressed ReactOS got anywhere at all, if you pirate NT 4's leaked source and see how many thousands upon thousands of the gigabytes of files it has, and that only being the second version of NT ever released, it's got a fucking lot of work going into it. Not just that but re-implementing DirectX, Driver Foundation, and all the very carefully orchestrated Executive serves is a huge undertaking. And even then, they're going out of their way to implement a few things released in versions of Windows past their target version (MinWin's architecture, extra APIs, etc.)
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I can't even really fathom that Herculean task. Just fuzzing applications and making a PoC takes me a lot of time. Taking the leaked source code of NT and using it to rebuild an OS is not the task any single person could do. There's just way too much going on.

Terry "wisely" chose going Ring0. He gives the user total power to do anything they wish within that limited scope. Security doesn't exist in TempleOS. It is, by design, dangerous. Actually making TempleOS networked would be the greatest security nightmare, ever. Eternal Blue/Double Pulsar wouldn't hold a candle to a networked TempleOS. MS08-067 would look like a small pimple in comparison. Terry made his Temple for himself, Mister God, and the user.
 
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He Who Points And Laughs said:
Terry "wisely" chose going Ring0. He gives the user total power to do anything they wish within that limited scope. Security doesn't exist in TempleOS. It is, by design, dangerous. Actually making TempleOS networked would be the greatest security nightmare, ever. Eternal Blue/Double Pulsar wouldn't hold a candle to a networked TempleOS. MS08-067 would look like a small pimple in comparison. Terry made his Temple for himself, God, and the user.
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Dear christ I never even thought about what would happen if TempleOS had networking, it probably is for the better that it doesn't.

He Who Points And Laughs said:
Taking the leaked source code of NT and using it to rebuild an OS
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As a side note, people who have seen the leaked source are forbidden from contributing, ReactOS is extremely legally cautious. I was just using the leaked source as an example of how complex the OS architecture is.
 
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He Who Points And Laughs said:
Terry "wisely" chose going Ring0. He gives the user total power to do anything they wish within that limited scope. Security doesn't exist in TempleOS. It is, by design, dangerous. Actually making TempleOS networked would be the greatest security nightmare, ever. Eternal Blue/Double Pulsar wouldn't hold a candle to a networked TempleOS. MS08-067 would look like a small pimple in comparison. Terry made his Temple for himself, Mister God, and the user.
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Doesn't ShrineOs have networking?
 
Remembering Terry's woman troubles

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