Terry A. Davis. Photo released to the public domain by Davis himself (TempleOS photo archive).
In Memoriam
Terry A. Davis
December 15, 1969 – August 11, 2018 · Programmer · Author of TempleOS and HolyC
Terry Andrew Davis did something the entire industry said couldn't be
done by one person: he wrote an operating system. Not a distro, not a
fork — an entire 64-bit operating system, alone, from the
bootloader up. Kernel, filesystem, graphics engine, editor, compiler,
games — over a decade of work and over a hundred thousand lines,
every one of them his. He built it for God — literally, as God's third temple, on
specifications he believed came straight from the Lord — and he called it
TempleOS.
This tribute is told in three parts — and his life's work is hosted
here, in full, forever:
Davis grew up programming — BASIC in school, then assembly language on
the family's Commodore 64. He earned degrees in electrical and computer
engineering at Arizona State and worked professionally in the 1990s —
including at Ticketmaster, and on SimStructure — his 2D physics simulation and control-systems
program (2000–2001), written in Visual C++ 6 with MFC forms: masses
and springs, gravity and electrostatics, an adaptive Runge-Kutta
solver, and a built-in C-like scripting language for control loops. Around 1996 came the schizophrenia diagnosis that
changed his life. And from about 2003, living in his parents' spare
bedroom, he spent a decade building TempleOS — inspired by the C64 and
consecrated, in his belief, to God. He released it to the public domain.
In his last years he lived on the road in Oregon, still streaming and
still coding, until August 11, 2018. He was 48.
Richland, Washington, 2017 — streaming daily from the library wi-fi. Public domain.TempleOS running — his desktop, his files, his games menu. Public domain.
"An idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity."
Download TempleOS — Hosted Here Permanently
TempleOS is public domain, and the complete official
distribution is mirrored here as a permanent archive — for as long as
this site stands. Point a VM's CD drive at the ISO (VirtualBox or QEMU;
64-bit, ≥512 MB RAM) or burn it for real hardware. Every byte of source
is on the disk — it compiles itself, in HolyC.
Ready-to-run VMware virtual machine — TempleOS preinstalled on a vmdk disk, 512 MB RAM, sound + e1000 NIC. Extract and open the .vmx in VMware Workstation/Player — no install needed.
Because AdaLogic BASIC carries some of his DNA. ALB is built in the
spirit Davis lived: that a complete system — language, compiler,
toolchain, ambitions down to bare metal — can be one coherent design
held in one mind, not a committee's compromise. His answer to "what can
one programmer do?" was an entire operating system written in the name
of God. Ours is a language. Every time someone says a real programming
tool can't be built by a person, rather than a company, the answer is
already on this page.
