Life before TempleOS, 1969-2003
Terry A Davis was born in December 1969. His dad was an industrial engineer who worked on US Navy aircraft. He ended up getting into the gifted class at elementary school and learning coding, first on an Apple II and later on a Commodore 64, and continued to program throughout high school.
Later on he claimed during this time period his brother put his dick in a vacuum, another brother got him high on gas fumes and they sucked each other’s dicks, he stuck his crotch in the hot tub drain because it “kind of sucked”, and he tried to get his dog to lick his nuts.
In 1990 as an undergraduate he got a job at Ticketmaster writing operating systems for the
VAX computer until 1996, an experience he brings up a lot when talking about his OS. He graduated from Arizona State University in 1994. At some point he ended up becoming an atheist after being born Catholic. However in 1996, that’s when he really started to lose it.
That’s when he started to “see” strange people following him around in suits monitoring him, and connected it to crazy ideas he had that he believed the government would want him dead for. He left town in his car, driving to the middle of nowhere and believing god was talking to him through the radio as he ended up in Marfa Texas, where he ditched his car his parents gave him, tore off all the side panels looking for tracking devices, and threw the keys in a desert. After being taken into police custody he broke his collarbone jumping out of the police car.
After hearing about artifacts in his X-Ray scans, he thought that aliens were planting artifacts inside him and he escaped, trying to steal a pickup truck. In jail he tried to break out by sticking his glasses in the electrical socket to trip the breaker, only to find out his frames weren’t conductive. He ended up in a mental hospital, refusing to eat the food thinking it was drugged and smashing windows.
He donated all his belongings after being released in an attempt to emulate Jesus (who he had by now started to worship again), and lived at first in his car driving nowhere, and later on the streets.
By July 1996, his mental state recovered enough to focus on other endeavors. He lived on credit cards for the next year, trying to build his own early 3d printer like device, a 3 axis stepper motor driven milling machine, giving up on the idea after his apartment nearly got set on fire by an errant Dremel tool.
From 1997-1999, he worked with Xytec Corp. making FPGA based image processing equipment, from 2000-2001 he wrote a Windows physics simulator called SimStructure which he claims “back in 2000 was impressive but now they have Grand Theft Auto and stuff”. His last job was working at Graphic Technologies from 2001-2002 making replacement chips for refilling “chipped” toner cartridges.
At some time during this he moved in with his parents, as he tried to write a sequel to George Orwell’s 1984 that he never finished. He also claims to have jerked off to fantasies of his niece Lani, played tag with a 7 year old who reached for his crotch, and fantasized about leading a catholic army of Mexicans and Brazilians, which he thinks was dumb because they’re “niggers”.
However, perhaps his boldest claim from this time period of his life was his run in with the “CIA Niggers”. On September 9th, 1999, he claimed to have run over a CIA nigger with his car and then licking the windshield after he was killed, scoring one for the good guys. This “incident” in particular would become somewhat of a meme among communities following him.
The early days of TempleOS, 2003-2013
In 2003, with the first 64 bit x86 compatible CPUs hitting the market, Terry saw it as the next big thing to change computers. He quickly dusted off some old code from his Ticketmaster days and went to work on his life’s work, TempleOS. Terry initially used quite a few different names for it including the J Operating System, SparrowOS, and LoseThos.
As Terry developed this OS however, he started to gain some unwanted attention from numerous forums he posted to, as he became famous for shamelessly promoting his OS and making the same kind of insane rambling posts about every single topic that he's famous for. At least once he edited his website
and filled it with rants about the CIA and talked about hitting a CIA actor with his car
Terry found himself shadowbanned from
HackerNews (turn on showdead to view all his long rambling posts), and banned from sites such as Reddit, OSDev, and SomethingAwful. His operating system became the butt of many jokes on communities he posted on, with commenters split between being in shock that one man made this entire OS or at how primitive it looked, and SomethingAwful’s review
was absolutely brutal.
Not all feedback of TempleOS under it’s various names during this time was negative however. MetaFilter
had a post about it when it was called LoseThos with plenty of replies from Terry himself, and OS News had
featured it under an even older name and later on as
LoseThos.
Terry also ended up being a topic of debate within the programming community about if it is ethical to silence somebody because they’re mentally ill, and in 2012 someone
wrote an article criticizing Terry’s detractors
While his OS remained relatively obscure except to those in the programming community or goons with memories of every deranged lunatic who spent $10 to post, 2013 was around the time Terry A Davis started to become noticed by people outside a relatively small community. It’s also when he gave his operating system it’s final name, TempleOS.
Discovering YouTube, 2013-now
In 2013, Terry uploaded a video to YouTube called the 64-Bit Temple Operating System, doing a tour of his operating system, which would become his most viewed video.
In 2014, Vice wrote an article on his life and TempleOS. This article pretty much summed up a lot of Terry’s life up to that point, and helped give him new fans as well.
Around this time, Terry A Davis also made a Twitter account, where he made the same kinds of posts that he usually makes on other sites. Some were rambling posts featuring words from God, however others were quite interesting. Recently he was banned from Twitter, as CEO Jack Dorsey has cracked down on any even remotely right wing leaning accounts.
This is where we end up at what he’s been doing today. Terry has mostly been using YouTube to provide an open window into his mind, similar to other skitzocows, while delivering the same quality comments that he used to deliver on sites like HackerNews.
Thanks to these videos, his OS, and the circumstances of his life, he has also gained a cult following of both trolls and people genuinely interested by his work.
His fans have produced videos compiling moments from his streams, written demos and software for TempleOS, created forks/distros of TempleOS such as Shrine, fanart of him, and even a
fangame, which fittingly enough is for TempleOS.
checks, which he spends on Shasta (a cheap dollar store soda), microwave food, and sometimes parts for his computer, which features a 24 thread Xeon with 128GB of RAM. He lives 48 hour days, staying awake for 32 hours and sleeping 16 hours a day. In the years since he discovered the internet, Terry has lived an interesting life coding, arguing with naysayers online, and running over CIA niggers with his car while battling CIA child sex agents.
