The Temple Operating System

http://www.templeos.org/

by flipstewart • 13 years ago

174 136 13 years ago

aegiso• 13 years ago

I don't have a dog in this fight, but some context might be useful to those who didn't instantly recognize this as I did:

This is a from-scratch operating system by LoseThOS, an absolutely brilliant but (allegedly) schizophrenic programmer who posts on HN but has been hellbanned countless times for the unintelligle religious rants and insults he posts.

This version looks like a rebranding of LoseThOS, the previous iteration of the operating system. It's worth Googling if you'd like more history.

andrewljohnson• 13 years ago

I often highlight his comments and read them for whatever reason. It's a little fascinating.

CamperBob2• 13 years ago

Yeah, in a "Daisy, Daisy" kind of way.

jevinskie2• 13 years ago

SparrowOS is another name for the project. I find the author's hellbanned posts fascinating, at least when they aren't racist!! The project is quite an undertaking for a single human.

Edit: After watching this video, I understand the SparrowOS name (audio required): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tuXweEJNFI

clicks• 13 years ago

Terry is the guy behind the LoseThOS monicker, he does not appear to conceal his identity, so it's not hard to find his contact information if you try. I'm wondering if one of us should try to reach him and make an effort to get him to understand that if he lays aside the gibberish addendums and racist insults in his communications he's more than welcome to be a part of this community. I mean, this is actually someone who has gradually been losing it because the world has not been kind to him.

Look at his post from a little more than two years ago: http://i.imgur.com/qL01m.png

There are no insults in that post, instead you see a man who's created something wonderful and isn't getting anything back for it. Of course the icing on this cake is that, that very post was marked as dead... his cry for help was not seen or heard by anyone.

orclev• 13 years ago

I don't even... is this some kind of joke? The website reads like a Christian version of the timecube website.

trafficlight• 13 years ago

No joke. It's this guy: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=losethos

fnordfnordfnord• 13 years ago

And this guy: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=SparrowOS

And this guy: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TempleOS

And he may have another ID for all I know.

fosap• 13 years ago

But the OS is real. The author is indeed strange. Some say he is schizophrenic.

meowface• 13 years ago

The author has some mental issues of some kind.

He is a great programmer, though, and his work shouldn't be discounted just because he's a bit off.

noir_lord5• 13 years ago

A bit off, that's like saying Stalin had the odd off day or Machiavelli was a tad manipulative.

LoseThos is balls to the wall flat out crazy.

AccordionGuy• 13 years ago

I knew I wouldn't be the only person to think, "Oh my, it's Timecube all over again..."

devindotcom• 13 years ago

I really want to have a spare laptop on which I can install all kinds of weirdo OSes just to see what they're like, not for "real" use. I'm perfectly happy running Win7 and OSX but that's like being happy with vanilla and chocolate at Baskin Robbins! I need some kind of heavy-duty bootloader and partitioning agent, though. Any recommendations for a starting place?

diek2• 13 years ago

Why not use VirtualBox, VMWare Player, or qemu?

oscilloscope2• 13 years ago

That works, but I couldn't get audio to work. So no listening to Songs by God and Me or anything else in the OS.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9CExVdxVwI

networked• 13 years ago

The obvious choice of boot manager would be GRUB 2 [1] but Plop Boot Manager [2] is entirely sufficient in many cases and easier to install and configure.

You can partition the hard drive, real or virtual, with Parted Magic [3].

If the reason you want to go with real hardware is that something like VirtualBox doesn't feel transparent enough to you (i.e., there's a lot of magic that happens in the background when you configure it through the GUI) I'd suggest trying out QEMU first. It requires more manual configuration (you'll have to read the man page and find the right set of command line options to make it do what you want) but the end result is that you have a better understanding of the virtual hardware your guest OS is running on. Plus, the Cirrus graphics card it emulates by default is well supported by old software.

[1] One good option is to use http://www.supergrubdisk.org/super-grub2-disk/.

[2] http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/

[3] http://partedmagic.com/doku.php

tjaerv2• 13 years ago

Why not simply use virtualization? Whether QEMU, Bochs, or VirtualBox?

justincormack• 13 years ago

Virtualisation is the best option rather than booting, for most operating systems. Xen is a good option, most OSs will run well under it (though probably not this one). You can boot other stuff from USB instead of bootloader.

S4M2• 13 years ago

> I really want to have a spare laptop on which I can install all kinds of weirdo OSes just to see what they're like

Actually, is there somewhere a list of all the weirdo OSes? I'd be interested to see that.

sounds• 13 years ago

Here are some links for when you have a few minutes:

What does your OS look like? Screen shots http://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=12087

Wiki list of projects http://wiki.osdev.org/Projects

I don't meant to only report on the ones at osdev.org, but from the osdev.org wiki you can find the other main osdev sites and find their project lists. If you approach this with the attitude of open exploration, I think you'll enjoy it more.

tjaerv2• 13 years ago

Released into the public domain, very cool!

hga• 13 years ago

A "muflax" created a distribution on GitHub: https://github.com/muflax/templeos

One minor version/2 months or so behind.

icelancer2• 13 years ago

Oh god, the LoseThOS guy returns.

Do yourself a favor: Turn on showdead in options and browse a bunch of threads. You will see his markov chain generator going nuts, plus his rants.

givehimagun• 13 years ago

Ohh man, I used to work with a guy like this....though he would sing and write poetry to you over IM and slowly descend into madness.

He also believed his code was bulletproof and never needed changing/refactoring. He was a team culture killer.

anonymousDan• 13 years ago

I don't quite understand what he meant by 'identity-mapped' - can anyone clue me in?

alepper• 13 years ago

Virtual memory addresses equal to their mappings in physical memory.

ekr• 13 years ago

I haven't looked through it, but it probably means that you can access individual physical bytes in memory by using their physical address (there's a one to one correspondence between the physical address and the logical address of a byte).

I'm not exactly sure how that is achieved, as far as I know, in order to switch to long mode, you need to have enabled paging.

I've been myself looking to start my own OS (protected mode), but it will probably be a unix code. What this guy has done obviously deserves a lot of admiration.

nknighthb• 13 years ago

Identity mapping refers to how the page tables are set up. It's hardly at odds with paging. The term doesn't even make much sense if paging isn't enabled.

munin2• 13 years ago

virtual memory makes a translation layer between virtual addresses and physical addresses.

an identity-mapping for virtual memory is then a mapping that directly translates a VA into the same PA, so VA 5 is PA 5.

the word 'paging' is overloaded to mean, to the cpu, the act of having the mmu perform translation from a physical to a virtual address, and, having the OS perform demand-loading of certain physical pages.

so non-identity mappings would happen when you switch a VA from mapping to a PA to mapping to nothing. the OS takes the contents of the PA and stores it on disk. the next time the VA is accessed, there is a 'page fault' and the data for the page is brought in to some other available PA and the VA is remapped to that PA (if the mapping exists in the stored pages on disk).

identity mappings are very simple because they remove the layer of indirection normally present in a virtual memory system. so you can run the processor in long mode, and use as much of the memory as you can address, but have none of the benefits of disk-paging, processes, separation, etc.

it's ironic because if you used processes, your system could be more performant, because your address space only contains the pages needed to run your particular task. if you run everything in r0, then you don't even need an OS. you sidestep a lot of the challenges in writing an OS at the expense of performance...

eck• 13 years ago

I know the author is a long-hellbanned hn user, possibly with some kind of mental illness.

But just out of curiosity, I downloaded the 24MB ISO from the website and loaded it up in a VMWare instance. It does boot...

It's an odd curses-like interface, with lots of blinking and scrolling. There are command-line looking things around, but all of the commands are kind of like C statements, like instead of 'cd ..' you have to do 'Cd("..");'. Really odd. There's a blue box that pops up possible completions, but it seems to have a whole dictionary in addition to commands.

Play with it if you have VMWare and you're bored, but I'd strongly recommend fully isolating it...

sillysaurus216• 13 years ago

Play with it if you have VMWare and you're bored, but I'd strongly recommend fully isolating it...

He's said that networking isn't a goal of the project, as the OS is intended for gaming. So it doesn't have any way to connect to any network.

thu2• 13 years ago

Isolation is not just about networking.

X-Istence2• 13 years ago

The entire OS is written in a language called C+ (now renamed to Holy C), it is an very interesting language in that it is just in time compiled. It's a mix between old school C and C++, taking some good/bad from both.

The language is fully documented too, see http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Doc/HolyC.html.

The entire OS runs in a single memory space, so processes communicating with each other is as simple as writing to that processes memory space and telling to go execute.

All of the .z files you find in the source tree directories are a gzip like algorithm that on the fly in the OS automatically unzips them, and then compiles the code contained within.

The interesting thing is that while the programs are generally just in time compiled, the main startup programs can't be, however you can easily change the OS and re-run the compiler, overwrite the already started OS and continue on. The compiler CAN write binaries but it is not recommended by the author.

And I may have spent entirely too much time in this ;-).

The author may be a schizophrenic, what he has built is kinda neat.

dschulz• 13 years ago

possibly with some kind of mental illness

Oh, that explains very well what I was thinking about those bible cites..

ChrisClark• 13 years ago

I think he posted an explanation for those seemingly gibberish posts. He wrote a program to grab random text from the Bible and other sources. Supposedly that randomness is what allows the truth to come out.

sgt101• 13 years ago

The crack about the holocaust in this story is not funny, sorry it just isn't.

mattdeboard• 13 years ago

You should understand a bit about the author before you let this concern you. It certainly wasn't intended to be humor.

icelancer2• 13 years ago

Or anything. I doubt he "intends" much.

oscilloscope2• 13 years ago

This is the operating system made to run Dwarf Fortress.

dylz• 13 years ago

So I will just leave this here: http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Demo/DateTime.html

rsync• 13 years ago

I love this.

First of all, a single day being equal to 32 bits - that's a nice touch right there.

Second, given the way most of the world reckons time (it is the year 2013, after all) seconds since Christ makes a lot more sense than seconds since 1970 ...

archgoon• 13 years ago

A nice cogent summary of the goals of the project:

"The main reason TempleOS is simple and beautiful is because it's ring-0-only and identity-mapped. Linux wants to be a secure, multi-user mainframe. That's the vision for Linux. That's why it has file permissions. The vision for TempleOS is a modern, 64-bit Commodore 64. The C64 was a home computer mostly used for games. It trained my generation how to program. It was simple, open and hackable. It was not networked. The games were not multimedia works of art, but generated programmatically with innocent, programmer (non-artist) quality graphics. It was simple and unsecure. If you don't have malware and you don't have bugs, protection just slows things down and makes the code complicated."

koala_advert• 13 years ago

More info and examples of the developers schizophrenic chatter here: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1aqdxn/temple_o...

cromwellian• 13 years ago

Anyone trying to bring back the spirit of the Commodore 64 gets a +1 from me, even if they are batshit crazy. In fact, you have to be crazy to do a project like this.

Here's to the crazy ones.

Iuz• 13 years ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0MsDl39UL0 what is going on here...

zokier• 13 years ago

Why is this (re)posted now? Personally I find these kinds of submissions (just link to front-page of a old project) bit annoying as they provide no context for why it's supposedly relevant now.

edit: here is some background info for those who are not familiar with this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4992749

mwally• 13 years ago

I spent longer than I care to admin playing AfterEgypt.

integraton• 13 years ago

The basic idea behind this, as I understand it, is that the author views the operating system as a way to interact with God.

See the following thread of comments on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1aqdxn/temple_o...

This is essentially the equivalent of "outsider art" in the technology world.

TazeTSchnitzel• 13 years ago

Indeed. He has the bizarre belief that his computer's PRNG is actually the holy spirit.

chris_wot• 13 years ago

Wouldn't a deity be insulted by a pseudo random number generator?

RamiK• 13 years ago

So, this is like the machine spirit from WH40K? That's sorta awesome. As for the whole religious \ racist thing, I've been around computer scientists and mathematician long enough to know a great many of them tend to favor one theory \ paradigm over the next for the most irrational reasons...

seunosewa• 13 years ago

Can we reach out to this guy and help him somehow?

kghose• 13 years ago

I say this with great respect: Mad Genius.

chez172• 13 years ago

Will people here show some fucking respect? Using terms like "bat shit crazy" and "inane" are extremely selfish and only serve to make yourself feel better at the expense of someone who is disabled. You don't need to qualify statements. You can appreciate this for what it is and not comment on the author's disability and the negative effects of it. The sad truth is that what was done here is too far advanced for most of us so people can't comment on the actual content and instead decide to publicly humiliate a disabled person.

joyeuse67013• 13 years ago

No, I will not pity someone who you, and or society may determine to be 'disabled' for one thing or another. I will appreciate TempleOS as much as the author's other works including the rants for they are one and the same, expressions of self. So guess what, this is an interesting piece of work, you know what else? I don't like being called racial slurs. I'm not going to show any respect for anyone who thinks they can call me or my brethren a racial slur, disabled or not. To tell me to respect someone like that IS insanity. So no, no respect given.

sillysaurus216• 13 years ago

His brain is physically deteriorating. It's schizophrenia. His brain matter is rotting away. It's not an illness like the flu. His thoughts are not his own in the same way yours or mine are. We are all just collections of cells, but his are haywire. He is incapable of choosing to give respect in the same way he's incapable of not hearing voices.

Zelphyr• 13 years ago

Respect is probably an incorrect word to use here. You rightly shouldn't be expected to respect someone's epithets regardless of the cause.

As has been mentioned, this man has a disease that is causing him to act in a way that in almost every other way he probably wouldn't otherwise act were he to not have this disease.

There was a man several years ago who was convicted of attempted rape. He had no prior history of anything like this yet when he was incarcerated he was constantly propositioning the female officers. It cost him everything including his wife and family. And rightly so. Except, just before his sentencing he was diagnosed as having a brain tumor. When it was removed the predatory behavior ceased and he was a normal man again. Two years later the tumor returned and he started trying to force sex on every woman he saw.

Was he a rapist? Technically, had he succeeded in raping a woman, yes. Should he be imprisoned for it? Probably hospitalized actually but either way I'm sure you'd agree he should not be allowed back into society.

So instead of "respect" how about "compassion"? Can you have compassion for a man who is provably brilliant but also suffering from a debilitating mental illness that just may be the source of his racial slurs?

thefreeman2• 13 years ago

I find it abhorrent that you are offended by the words of someone who clearly has no control over themselves. Are you that insecure that you will take the rants of a schizophrenic and use them to play the race card?

chez172• 13 years ago

You need to get over yourself. The author of those clearly awful comments has a mental illness. For you to take those comments at face value and hold the author completely accountable is something I literally can't understand as an empathetic human being. You are simply being self-righteous at the expense of someone with a mental illness. That is a level of selfishness, obtuseness, and ignorance I can't understand.

darklajid4• 13 years ago

Big words and not quite respectful either.

For me? This is unacceptable. Any technical project that is tied into religion is already, by definition, not for me. TempleOS and its weird language are already far off the scale of sanity.

Believe is something very personal and I never attack someone for that. Unless.. they try to spread it, claim that this madness is superior in some sort of way.

So - that guy here might have medical issues. That's really sad and I do believe that he's impressive as a programmer.

But this submission cannot judge the OS without the bag of insults and religious madness it includes. I'm close to invoke Godwin (hey, at least I'm German. Now that'd be new..) to convince you that "But that's a neat project" isn't good enough if the message, the whole idea behind that thing is totally, fatally flawed and unacceptable.

I'm not trying to insult the man behind the project. Still, the project itself is worthless and not even remotely interesting to me, _because_ of the man behind that project.

People start judging startups because of the CEO here everyday. We still have anti-MS zealots, that throw Bill Gates jokes around. This project isn't 'protected' from being considered inacceptable, just because the guy behind it has a medical condition.

I flagged the submission. I heavily disagree with your idea of appreciating a piece of work while ignoring the dangerous ideas and opinions the creator shouts out - even if no one _wants_ to listen.

jimminy2• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure chez17 was talking about the author. The comments here are despicable in regards to how they talk about him, especially when it was someone else that posted this.

By "appreciate it for what it is" it means you can appreciate it at 0 or even less, that's your prerogative. But we shouldn't be attacking this man. Judge the project for what it is, but the personal attacks against the man are unnecessary.

oinksoft• 13 years ago

Agreed, this place can be really disgusting in its intolerance of mental illness. Backgrounds and persepectives represented in a tech/startup-specific community aren't bound to be the most diverse. Most people here are successful Americans.

For what it's worth, there is a far more interesting and respectful discussion from last fall on Metafilter: http://www.metafilter.com/119424/An-Operating-System-for-Son...

My favorite bit:

  losethos:
    I did a flight simulator but it looks awful, at best.
    Boot it in VMWare. Get someone else to run it. It's
    called "/LT/Demo/GameStarters/EagleDive.CPZ" It's an
    eagle diving for fish. It's just a demo mostly. I often
    show restraint in making my demos simple.

  East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94:
    bro i think you can be proud of the flight simulator
    you wrote for the operating system you also wrote

bobsgame5• 13 years ago

Regarding schizophrenia/psychotic states and the religious connection:

People here do not realize this is what happens when your spirit gets crushed- the psyche regresses into a state where hope is the only thing left. That is where religion comes in, which is fundamentally the psyche's last grasp on reality by clinging onto hope in society. (Father, save me.)

The psychology involved is absolutely real, and the effects can be seen in any brainwashing victims who have had their will destroyed through deceit or betrayal. This is documented stuff- you can make someone schizophrenic. Ever been dumped by a girlfriend and felt "lost" for some time, losing some ability to reason? Congratulations, you have experienced damage to the psyche caused by emotional shock, otherwise known as "heartbreak." This is what religion is referring to through the metaphor of the "soul."

Furthermore, society has responded to this man's determination and faith in redemption, i.e. "God's Will." We're adjusting and slowly coming to accept his mental state and are beginning to appreciate the impressive effort put into his project. His faith is working, and in this we are both observing and are participating in the 'miracle' of faith, which is due to the emotional bonds that humans create.

We are pack animals like many others in nature, we create family units, and we are essentially structured just like the natural world around us despite what we like to think about ourselves- our conscious thoughts are produced by our subconscious, we're not in control, and we have no idea what the hell we're doing except chasing a vision of success. Success in what, exactly?

Religion is not what you think it is! It is not entirely pointless superstitious nonsense, it is an ancient way of describing the matters of the pull of emotion from the heart and the effects it has on the human psyche through abstractions and metaphor. It is very difficult to understand except through experience, because it's relying on a different state of the brain and attempting to describe feelings. People call it "wisdom" because that is the easiest explanation, since it is dealing with emotional states of the human mind that cannot be explained logically, only through abstract stories, warnings, and the like, same as Greek mythology (don't fly too close to the Sun). Thou shalt not steal, because the subconscious guilt may eventually damage your trust in yourself and you may be cast out from your peers. (i.e. the Kingdom of God.)

Likewise, Hell is a metaphor for what happens when you are lost in the world with a shattered psyche, with no social bonds to pull you back up. It is a terrifying fate, and it certainly happened thousands of years ago to men just as it happens today- where do you think the minds of the homeless pushing around shopping carts are? Modern psychology (at least some of it) is essentially a scientific explanation of the situations and consequences that the ancients described in the Bible.

It is not literal, nor did that have any meaning when it was written. It is the "Word of God" as again, a metaphor, describing the nature of human beings and their common behavioral patterns leading to predictable consequence. The Old Testament is essentially an ancient Almanac, containing metaphor about the creation and nature of the universe, orally passed down legends and tradition about the beginning of mankind, a history of the fate of various sects and tribes and family lines of man originating from Israel, and collections of poems, songs, and Confucian-like snippets of wisdom collected by kings.

The traditions, symbolism, culture, music, and weird mannerisms of the church (or any religion in any culture) are there for a reason. They are symbols that affect the subconscious and evoke emotion, the same way that subliminally seeing a fast food sign in your peripheral vision will make your stomach rumble, and the reason why all advertising works. Described in an ancient way, this is magic. It's real, and you're exposed to it every day in both positive and negative forms.

The "house of religion" where participants submit into a particular culture of tradition gives humans in various situations and walks of life something to bond together with, creating a social family unit i.e. "children of God, flock, congregation, etc." This feeling is subconsciously uncomfortable to the logical crowd like this one, which is compromised of young men driven by their very nature to break free of their parental family unit and create their own, while not realizing that is exactly what they are doing or where their ambition comes from. They are clinging to their confidence in themselves, and if that doesn't pan out, the only thing left to hold onto is hope in the compassion of your fellow man as a collective. It is sort of like a recursive self-deception where people place their faith in their own emotions (God's name is Jealousy) which actually works and helps people pull themselves back out. Hard to wrap your mind around the illogical!

Let's not disappoint the man. He deserves recognition, and it is in our very nature to give him a hand and pull him out of his rut. Perhaps he will even find a woman to bond with, set up a steeple above their heads in "holy matrimony," and become a King himself.

callmeed• 13 years ago

Your comment implies that (a) everyone on HN is an atheist and (b) religious people are incapable of logical/rational thought.

I don't think that's true.

bobsgame5• 13 years ago

I didn't intend to imply either, it's just directed at those who don't understand (one of) the needs that religion fulfills or what it's about. Of course it is only my own understanding and I'm asserting an opinion.

sillysaurus216• 13 years ago

You can make someone schizophrenic.

I have no idea what you're talking about. Schizophrenia is a physical illness. Your brain physically deteriorates. You can't make anyone schizophrenic any more than you can make them lose an arm. In fact, making them lose an arm would be much easier than making them schizophrenic.

bobsgame5• 13 years ago

Please look up schizophrenia and the connection to brainwashing victims.

(Unfortunately it is difficult to sort through real information vs forum posts written by schizophrenics whose minds are attempting to blame imaginary targets because they cannot determine the real cause.)

tazjin• 13 years ago

No, there is a large amount of factors that have been linked to being able to cause schizophrenia. There is no final answer to the debate at the moment.

krelian• 13 years ago

I love this project no matter in which iteration it's sent (just hate the inevitable wtf comments from those who don't bother to do the minimal dig-in) It's as if it was taken from some (good) psychological thriller/hacker movie. A genius schizophrenic writes an OS that will bring him closer to God, sprinkled with esoteric religiously sounded phrases throughout.

pearjuice• 13 years ago

This project would greatly benefit from a Github repository and an appropriate issue tracker. But then again, Terry completely loses foucs of reality every now and then (this is partly because of his mental disorder) and goes on to a path of complete anhiliation, destroying everything he created. This happened a few times with documentation and supporting websites he put up.

Can't anyone of the fine folks here help him with that?

The Temple Operating System

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