On Terry A. Davis

https://schizophrenic.io/blog/on-terry-a-davis

by djaouen • 2 years ago

113 78 2 years ago

ImaCake• 2 years ago

It's great to see someone with schizophrenia writing about the disorder. It's (relatively) easy to find patient voices for most psychiatric disorders, but very difficult with schizophrenia due to the severity of the condition. I've passed your blog along to some researchers and my network :)

djaouen2• 2 years ago

I also have some other resources for schizophrenic programmers, if you are interested. In particular, [1].

[1] https://schizophrenic.io/blog/jobs

vletrmx• 2 years ago

While it did have some recreational value, it did not provide a product that people could use that would enrich their lives.

Because providing a 'product' is the sole criterion for success? The author is missing the point and doesn't understand TempleOS.

oneeyedpigeon• 2 years ago

It may sound like the writer is implying lack of financial success is bad, but I don't think that's their intention. I think the word "product" is just a filler here - it could equally be "something" or "an executable".

AlecSchueler6• 2 years ago

What's the recreational value without an executable? Just watching his videos? Then surely the videos are the product.

zoky• 2 years ago

I think the author is just trying to say that the reason TempleOS didn’t receive widespread—or virtually any—regular use has more to do with its lack of inherent utility to most people, rather than a conspiracy to suppress its adoption as Terry apparently believed.

Gare• 2 years ago

Where I disagree with him is in his insistence that there was a grand conspiracy to hold back his operating system, perhaps orchestrated by the CIA.

Sound like Terry himself wanted it to be successful?

lukan• 2 years ago

"Because providing a 'product' is the sole criterion for success?"

Wasn't the OS made to be used by people for real and not just as a toy?

Could people use it for real? As a daily driver to get things done? (A real product)

I do not think so, so what do you think what was the point of TempleOS then?

codetrotter2• 2 years ago

what was the point of TempleOS

From what I’ve seen from videos where Terry was talking about TempleOS, it seems that a large part of the point of the OS and the programs that shipped with it was as a way of “talking to god”. Where he’d run a program and it would generate some random output and he said that those were words from god. I have to assume that this was very much because of his condition. Either way, a temple to god is part of what this OS was. TempleOS.

Furthermore, TempleOS validated many of his ideas of how an OS could be built differently from how many other OSes are made.

TempleOS is like a modern day Amiga or Commodore 64 operating system.

And I could easily imagine a world in which TempleOS was distributed preinstalled on some kind of non-networked home computer that they could have in Sunday schools around the world, as a tool for bible study and as a way of learning about computers, engaging youth who are interested in technology.

AlecSchueler6• 2 years ago

Could people use it for real? As a daily driver to get things done?

It could be, but "getting things done" here means communicating with God, not taking zoom calls.

skissane6• 2 years ago

One thing that makes TempleOS less approachable is the extreme idiosyncrasy of some of its design decisions - e.g. limiting it to 640x480 with 16 colours even though supporting higher resolution and colour depth would have been little extra work, an intentionally very garish user interface, refusing to implement any networking support for ideological reasons. It was never going to be a mainstream OS, but it might have attracted a larger community of tinkerers if it were not for those decisions. (There are forks which improve some of these aspects, but a fork is never going to be as popular as the original.)

That said, extreme idiosyncrasy is relatively common in schizophrenia.

kqr• 2 years ago

Well, that doesn't seem to stop users of fantasy consoles, so I'm not sure it's as a big problem for a userbase as you think.

AlecSchueler6• 2 years ago

It's the idiosyncrasies that make it notable surely.

djaouen2• 2 years ago

I am not saying that TempleOS wasn't a technical marvel. It was. I am merely stating the fact that its usage was (mainly) limited to recreation. Not that that's a bad thing, but my own ambition is to produce something with more than margi... small product-market fit.

Edit: I'm sorry if I come across as arrogant. I still have the "decoration" (programming-wise) of my elite education I am trying to trim. :(

YPPH4• 2 years ago

Not to trivialise his achievement, but I'd be willing to wager any moderately competent systems programmer, if given 10+ years and no other commitments (work or family) could write a programming language, compiler, and real mode operating system for an x86_64 system.

Side note, why were Ticketmaster hiring systems programmers writing such low level code? I grew up in the 90s/00s so missed this era of computing.

thinkingemote• 2 years ago

The question is why more people have not done it.

A bit like picassos answer to someone saying to him about his art "I could have done that!!" being "why haven't you?"

I would put templeos at the same level as art in that it's the creation and life rather than the craft or utility. Or in other words there is something transcendental about the project which would go beyond (but not technically) something a competent systems programmer should write as a hobby.

Art Vs craft has more of an artist inside of it. Noone else could have written templeos.

mort96• 2 years ago

Most people don't have 10 years of uninterrupted time to spend on an art project. Most of those who do choose to spend that time on something other than writing a compiler and OS.

EDIT: to be clear, that doesn't mean it's not impressive or not a great achievement. It's a fantastic piece of art IMO.

29athrowaway• 2 years ago

Others have done it, but not many.

You can find such projects in sourceforge.

wiseowise2• 2 years ago

The question is why more people have not done it.

What practical value does it bring outside of 15 minute awe from internet nerds? No sarcasm.

whstl5• 2 years ago

A lot of people did.

I met Terry online in a couple OSDev forums in the early 00s, before his downward spiral. He was already quite combative, but still coherent. This was even before he named it LoseThos (he changed the name a few times after). I used and gave feedback.

Anyway: There were about a hundred people back then writing hobby operating systems. Perhaps everyone in those forums was? I was one of them. Some OSs had graphics. Some had POSIX. A few people could even run Firefox. I never got to this point. Some even had that same C64-like character of TempleOS.

Like GP, this is not to trivialize the work and dedication that went into TempleOS. But unfortunately he didn't became famous because of it at all. Most reddit people who talk about TempleOS haven't even installed the OS, and pretty much everyone that mentioned TempleOS to me in real life haven't even seen Youtube videos of it.

Which is very sad, because IMO lack of people using it is why Terry ended up becoming isolated and combative in those communities. People still care more about a cool story than a labour of love.

superb_dev• 2 years ago

That’s the impressive part, it takes a certain drive and vision to work on the same project for more than a decade

nwarwick• 2 years ago

Drive, vision, and sometimes insanity.

ropejumper2• 2 years ago

I agree.

What I like about TempleOS is that Terry wasn't afraid to make something new and unique, even though it was completely incompatible with everything else.

DolDoc is such a cool idea. Not a unique one, but you don't find many operating systems which have a shell based on that. Since the command output is in DolDoc, you can type `DIR` at the command line and get a list which expands into the whole file tree when you click on it. DolDoc also means that his games have all the images and models embedded in the code, and you can just go there and edit them.

And there are a lot of these. Sure it's clunky and weird and sort of unusable, but I appreciate it for what it is. And I think it's really awesome. Take a look at a random person's osdev project and you'll see mostly the same thing — a unix-like that tries to be compatible with POSIX and port all the utilities. TempleOS is as far from that as you can get (though definitely not unique either).

(Also, a minor correction: TempleOS is not real mode, it runs in full 64-bit mode with symmetric multiprocessing and everything. The text UI isn't the VGA text mode, it's a framebuffer that also displays graphics).

YPPH4• 2 years ago

You're right, it's not real mode. I think I should have said ring zero.

frou_dh• 2 years ago

TempleOS was not just a dry operating system project. It included lots of original creative media like games, music and more.

Very different to Competent Systems Programmer writing Unix Clone #983

Barrin92• 2 years ago

Not to trivialise his achievement

It deserves to be talked about. The cult following and media attention that he got is really just a function of the romanticizing of mental illness and the "crazy genius" trope that people projected on him.

Writing a decent operating system is a good technical achievement but quite a few people have done so as hobby projects. The real attention came from this "temple for god" thing. Instead people should have talked about what it was, a mentally ill person that had no help for decades and it cost him his life. It's quite astonishing and telling that with all the attention he had, he ran around homeless and confused while people were treating him like a circus curiosity or fringe religious character.

helpfulContrib• 2 years ago

One of my first jobs as a junior programmer in the 80's was to build a multimedia engine that would boot both on CGA and EGA (and then, later, VGA) systems, was not allowed to use any MS-DOS calls (BIOS and pure assembly only) and it had to run the same bytecode scripts for the programs being made with the engine, seemlessly.

It had a compiler for the script, a bytecode interpreter and VM, and different HAL's depending on the system in use, with the VM being used to play what were then called "multimedia" titles - graphics and text and sound, all on the same screen. This all had to be done by me, a lowly junior, and when it was finally delivered and titles were shipped, I moved on to other things .. an online version of the engine that could get its bytecode over ethernet .. and I had to write all the drivers and HAL code myself.

Sure, this was the 80's and programmers were a different breed then, but it always bugs me when Mr Special 21st Century Comp-Sci Grad comes onboard to his first ever 'real' job and yet .. has no idea how to even find the compiler on his system, let alone build one himself.

There is a deleterious effect with the computing industry, which happens whenever the New Cool Shit™ hits the scene - everyone forgets the Old Cool Shit™ as fast as they can - but, inevitably, eventually, you are gonna have to learn how to write a compiler, kids, and build a VM/ecosystem around it, at the very least. (Or just use Lua, lol...)

When I first encountered TempleOS, I wasn't as impressed as my peers - this is just how we did things in the 80's - but what was impressive was the persistence he exhibited in extending TempleOS in spite of the great personal suffering under which he clearly labored ..

speed_spread• 2 years ago

Writing TempleOS was his way of coping with his illness. His software was his refuge, a place where he felt safe and things made sense.

6510• 2 years ago

People do lots of things that other people could have done.

TempleOS is just about the worse possible example of this.

slmjkdbtl• 2 years ago

I think people mainly think TempleOS as an artistic achievement more than technical

skissane6• 2 years ago

Side note, why were Ticketmaster hiring systems programmers writing such low level code? I grew up in the 90s/00s so missed this era of computing.

At some point in the 1970s or 1980s, Ticketmaster made the extremely unusual decision of writing their own operating system for VAX. Even back then, that was a pretty weird decision. And it wasn't Terry's idea, they started doing it before he worked there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9808995

And apparently decades later their backend was still stuck on it (is it still stuck on it???), albeit now running under a software emulator instead of physical VAX hardware.

Most people on VAX ran either Unix or VMS, both of which offered migration paths to other platforms (Alpha -> Itanium -> x86 for VMS; and there were lots of alternative hardware platforms for Unix). But Ticketmaster's weird decision to write their own OS made that almost impossible.

YPPH4• 2 years ago

Thanks for the info! Glad to see I'm not the only one thinking it was a weird path to take.

SonOfLilit• 2 years ago

I have the skills to pull this off in a year or two, but would get bored after a month. Actually doing it is super rare and very admirable.

hurrdurr57• 2 years ago

Not to trivialise his achievement, but I'd be willing to wager any moderately competent systems programmer, if given 10+ years and no other commitments (work or family) could write a programming language, compiler, and real mode operating system for an x86_64 system.

But could they do it while suffering from severe psychosis and believing that they were being hunted by bioluminescent CIA operatives?

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 years ago

Not to suggest that the parent comment trivialises the work, but there is big difference between "could do it" and "did it". Only the later deserves respect.

Also, the parent commenter's hypothetical does not take into account that the "moderately competent systems programmer" would have to do this work while suffering from a debilitating mental illness.

To be clear, this is not simply a question of "Given 10+ years with no other committments, could someone else do this work?" The question is whether another person with schizophrenia has actually done this work, staying focused for such an extended period.

(If it's common for employed "developers" to have schizophrenia, then please disregard this comment.)

seanmcdirmid• 2 years ago

Most of us can't take a 10+ year sabbatical to do this kind of stuff. Even in academia, you get bogged down in grants and keeping your grad students fed.

Not discounting his achievement though, it is still noteworthy.

astrobe_• 2 years ago

Let’s be clear: schizophrenia does not cause racism

Depends on the type of racism. If it's a false sense of superiority - probably the most common type of racism - well, maybe. But if it's the belief that some type of people are hostile to you for some reason, and your personality makes it so that you return it, then it is a persecutory delusion, just like conspiracy theories.

silisili• 2 years ago

I'll just note that while Terry loved the word, he didn't ever really seem to use it as a racist slur, except by coincidence. He just directed it at anyone and anything he didn't like.

ghnws• 2 years ago

People also use extremely offensive language (including racial slurs, but not limited to them) under drugs, alcohol etc. because the words are extreme and nothing else. Using a racial slur does not necessarily make one a racist.

skissane6• 2 years ago

Schizophrenia absolutely can induce racism in some people.

Schizophrenia (and other related disorders) can induce in some people obsessive socially unacceptable thoughts, which can include racist thoughts. It doesn't happen to everyone with schizophrenia – there are plenty of people with schizophrenia who aren't racist. And even if a person with schizophrenia is racist, it isn't necessarily due to their schizophrenia – they could well be racist for the same reasons many people without schizophrenia are racist. But that said, there absolutely are some people who aren't racist, and then they have a psychotic episode, and as a result of that psychotic episode they develop racist delusions/obsessions.

This can take the form of persecutory delusions, but not always. Schizophrenic delusions can take make many forms other than just persecutory, so in some people schizophrenia can induce non-persecutory racist delusions.

johnisgood• 2 years ago

can, just like many things.

As for socially unacceptable thoughts, yeah what yesterday was acceptable is today unacceptable. :)

pwiffo• 2 years ago

The BBC published a radio documentary on Terry Davis a few years back, after his death:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000b4r3

simongr3dal• 2 years ago

Thanks for posting. The rest of the blog is also short and sweet, I’m struggling a bit with self worth and self criticism so I found it very touching and relatable.

It’s kind of interesting how I’ve come to expect blog posts to be much longer since microblogging pretty much exists exclusively on social media.

ThinkBeat• 2 years ago

""This is one person who has a similar diagnosis to Terry who then goes on to say "I dont have these .... symptoms"".

Good for you. I am happy for you. (truly)

But to then extend that to everyone with a similar diagnosis, as some form of universal fact is entirely wrong.

Delusion and paranoid delusions are common symptoms of schizophrenia¹. Common does not mean everyone for sure has them, just that many do.

In so far as schizophrenia does not make you racists that is true, but you do not get to pick your delusions. They may be an amplification of existing opinions, but for many they are not. Further to blame a person who is delusional for having a view of the world that is not normal, well that is the entire description of delusions.

Can you blame a person who stutters for stuttering?

Thus one should extend a lot of tolerance to a person who has a terrible illness that no way is self-afflicted and one that we do not yet have a dependable cure for.

I am certain that at some point in this life Terry desperately wished to be “normal”. Farther into it, and getting deeper into the illness the understanding of normal vs abnormal may be a difficult concept to understand for the person.

I have had schizophrenia in my family, and I have visited her at the hospital. Where there were a lot of other schizophrenics. Clearly only those who suffer a lot and who may become violent ad self-harming, ends up at such a place long term.

Some of the people there had an incredibly different reality that they existed within.

We should extend a generous amount of tolerance for people who are ill and suffer from this. To get angry and tell them to stop and tell then they are wrong may well cause a deeper fall into paranoia.

This is not something people chose. Nor is it something we have a reliable cure for. Some can be greatly helped with medication and / or therapy. Other not.

¹ https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/schizophrenia/sy... https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/schizophrenia/w...

soygem• 2 years ago

RIP Terry Davis. And remember that feds glow in the dark.

barbs• 2 years ago

I believe Terry was an intelligent man and a beautiful soul, struggling with severe mental illness.

I had the pleasure of interacting with him in the form of creating a GIMP plugin for his custom image file format.

https://michaelbarlow.com.au/gra-plugin/

ugjka• 2 years ago

As schizophrenic myself i feel like Terry has became a meme but without anyone ever realizing what terrible condition he was in and he was in a terrible country that has no safety nets and basic healthcare for people like him

westmeal• 2 years ago

Yeah and 4chan didn't help either as usual. Well, some people tried to - but on the whole people just treated him as another thing to laugh at. RIP terry.

marginalia_nu• 2 years ago

Terry is a bit of a hero of mine.

He's definitely a tragic character, almost Shakespearean, with all manner of flaws, and he got dealt a really rotten hand in life, but there's just something about the determination with which he pursued his unique vision through hell or high water that really appeals to me.

On Terry A. Davis

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