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Terry Davis, the schizophrenic individual who was tasked by God to create the TempleOS operating system (and spent over 12 years single handedly doing so) was killed by a train in Oregon (link: https://www.resetera.com/threads/templeos-creator-terry-davis-dies-during-his-great-western-adventure.65752/ )
Details remain sketchy and the death has been largely unnoticed other than by his followers and family. Some speculation is that it was suicide.
An older motherboard article about Terry and TempleOS : https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wnj43x/gods-lonely-programmer
"A constructive look at TempleOS" goes into some of what makes the OS interesting : http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/
Link to the free and public domain Temple OS: http://templeos.org/
Have any Soylentils ever installed and played with TempleOS?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by SomeGuy on Monday September 10 2018, @10:53PM (7 children)
Of course, I respect that this guy had a genuine illness... so what's everyone else's excuse? :P
Still it's great that he must have had supportive people so he could have the time to build such an OS. Sometimes it is important to do what you feel you must, even if you don't understand why.
There is so little OS innovation these days, it is interesting to see a truly unique take on the matter.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 10 2018, @11:05PM (2 children)
You say there is little innovation in OSes these days, but what do you think an OS needs to do?
Fundamentally, it's there to launch/kill/manage tasks and IO.
(And yes, using all the well-known mechanisms to enable this like virtual memory, etc.)
It just seems like a fully explored field. Applications are another story...
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 10 2018, @11:15PM
Ok, sorry, I read the article this time.
I see the guy wrote more than an OS for this machine, and at the same time less than what we would consider an OS these days.
It is something of a throwback to the 8 bit (and early 16 bit) microcomputer era: a complete system for using the machine. Not scalable in many senses. Superceded by the systems that came after the 8 bit computers, after DOS.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday September 11 2018, @02:39AM
It was the first with a heirarchical filesystem, for example.
I expect the reason it wasn't more widely used was that it only ran on a specific kind of box.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by DECbot on Monday September 10 2018, @11:15PM (3 children)
I read the second review link for the OS (http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/ [codersnotes.com]. It definitely had some interesting ideas. It sounds like something I'd want to play around with on a Raspberry Pi. Would I every want to put it on the internet or network? Hell no--everything runs on ring 0. I don't trust myself enough to run everything ring 0, why should I trust the internet?
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 11 2018, @04:06AM
If there'd not be the (lack of any) security concerns, I can see it as an excellent case for running on embedded device.
But... image it in the IoT context.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Tuesday September 11 2018, @09:51AM (1 child)
Did you miss the part about it not having any networking functionality?
TempleOS reminds me of the BASIC interpreters and other apps that '80s microcomputers included in ROM. For instance, the Coleco ADAM had a word processor, my MSX computer has a calendar, there was a Yamaha one with a music composer. I've always thought that the system boot ROM should contain some useful stuff (if not a BASIC or other language interpreter then at least a hex/sector editor or maybe a terminal program). It was funny that Amiga shipped with a relatively huge 512KB of ROM but it still couldn't do anything without a workbench floppy.
TempleOS is a bit bigger at 16MB, but it looks like it's a bootable ISO...
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday September 11 2018, @07:26PM
Another old example would be the classic Tandy TRS-80 Deskmate, truly a classic.