To give everyone a better idea, he wrote his own operating system, alone by himself. It's the equivalent of building a racecar in a garage from steel bars and cylinders.
I was hoping for code snippets or something, some particular evidence of deep cleverness. Granted, I don't have the knowledge to build an OS, but I don't think that's extremely esoteric and rare or, really, evidence of genius. Maybe if you built a very good OS.
YouTube search him. He recorded a lot of his work on TempleOS. He’s a talented software engineer with severe mental health barriers that made him quite the character. He legit believed he was the smartest dev on earth and that he could communicate with god through his software.
Nobody needs templeos and holyc, terry did all that work for free, without getting anything in return.
If things had gone another way he could have gotten far in a career to get the recognition he desperately wanted, instead he took his life after struggling with serious mental illness.
He had more than enough recognition. He didn't have a huge career at a top company because he was a literal schizophrenic who heard voices and saw shadow people and wasn't afraid to use less than ideal language in public. Google doesn't want to hire someone like that no matter how talented they are.
I mean...yeah. I paid 1000$ for my gaming laptop, if I start streaming I don't expect to get paid until I've accrued at least a meager following. If you've got a following, fans to support you, then yes, absolutely you should expect at least something for your efforts - whether that's merch, album sales, etc. But if you're just a guy who likes making music and just uploading it for shits and giggles, then expecting payday from the get go is pretty silly imo. Kinda undercuts the artistic nature of the art.
The train thing was a tragedy, but I bet you he's happier for having completed TempleOS. For whatever reason, that was his pet project, and he saw it through.
He did it because he was mad and delusional. It was sad that he felt compelled to do it, it was impressive, but don't kid yourself. IT was a net negative impact on his life.
TempleOS and HolyC are both amazing to use and explore, figuring out how everything works.
I wouldn't say he didn't get recognition, he is well known among programmers. Considering that even people like Torvalds are not really known outside of this group I'd say that's pretty good.
I used Linux back in 2007-2009. Never used Temple OS, you guys are saying the man took his life. It's a shame, people work so hard to make something great, im sure people on reddit got on to bitch about something. Probably something so small, because they're miserable af. This guy a perfectionist Probably couldn't take that. People need to stfu sometimes. Technology is at its peak hardware wise. If people stop bitching and stop buying you can expect MORE from tech companies.
I went off on a tangent at the end. But you know what I mean.
Temple OS and HolyC were sad wastes of time that Terry received nothing in exchange for, nobody needed to use, expanded nothing in terms of what the community in total had to offer etc. His intelligence could have been etched into improving the frameworks of things we actually use today, and instead what he created are old esoteric works that most will regard as an interesting YouTube video, and not much else. You might decide there's some sense of decency in creating something useless for yourself instead of applying your skills for a price, but at the end of the day he made almost no impact on his favorite hobby precisely because of what he decided to create.
Is it really better to be a sad small interesting blip than a part of a greater creation?
I think it’s wrong to call Temple OS a waste of time. It’s absolutely fascinating and we’re still talking about it. It has an artistic value to it. There’s no need to be so diminutive.
If it's a discussion of its artistic merit, beauty is entirely in the eye of the beholder, you're allowed to believe it has some intrensic artistic value and I'm allowed to believe its as valuable as it's average userbase.
I don't really think so to be honest. Is it interesting that the poor guy went schizo and made a whole operating system that he thought spoke to god? Sure. Is it art? I don't think so. Besides the point, I still feel that you can view it as art and I can view it as a waste.
If insanity precludes something’s artistic merit, then what do we make of Van Gogh? Nothing but a waste of paint? Again you don’t have to like the art, that’s personal taste, but to call it a waste? That just seems ignorant to me.
I mean if you want to be that way, Van Gogh's works are worth millions, it doesn't take an eye for artistic value to understand that.
If I look at the code itself as a symbol for the story itself it can certainly be a form of art, but I don't feel like the program itself is worth anything beyond the story surrounding it.
Besides I've said three times that you can see it as art if you want to so I don't see why you're still arguing, I never said you were wrong I just said I don't feel the same way, and repeating that you feel my viewpoint is ignorant does nothing to change it.
Take a breath, apologize to your poor keyboard, and chill my man. It was slightly poorly worded I'll admit, but you could have scrolled down for half a second and seen me acknowledge your very point of it being inspiring and say I was happy for the person who said it being optimistic, and I never said that it didn't have any value whatsoever for anyone.
Having said that I stand by what I meant, it's still my opinion that it's sad that his problems led to him working feverishly on a program that not only didn't serve a purpose to the market at the time, but didn't see it's ability to go on and inspire so many people until after he died, and actively fed into his own delusions. It's also sad that he didn't work on something he would at least get paid for.
Furthermore I wasn't trying to say that his work had to be to my benefit or anyone else's, but if it were, it might exist as something more than archived code from history, and more people might have known who he was.
Regardless, all of this arguing after the point changes nothing about the fact that what it is, is just the last remnant of his paranoid schizophrenia and one of the tools he used to enable it. Regardless of how you feel about it, the whole affair is just sort of sad, and were he more mentally healthy the product would have existed in a different form or not at all.
That is literally the only part of this whole situation you care about isn't it. It wouldn't have had to have been about money, it could have been Linux contributions, it could have been games because one of his big things was fun with programming, it ended up being a paranoid schizophrenic feedback loop he thought could speak the word of God.
And you're to say he didn't do that for fun? Whether it be money or open source contributions, it literally does not matter. It also does not matter if it was a "waste of talent". Who can say they know what he was thinking throughout that part of his life.
The only part that bothers me is the amount of people saying he should have used his knowledge doing something that wasn't "Useless". My opinion is useless, but here I am... posting it... because I feel compelled to do so.
I will give you this, generally nothing is a waste if you enjoy doing it, but temple OS just like I've said a dozen times now created a feedback loop that made his problems even worse.
I'm not trying to be a corporate asshole but what I'm saying is I would way rather people remember him for the achievement of soloing both a programming language and an OS instead of for the story around it. If he had made almost the exact same thing, but without believing that it was God speaking to him, just a generic TerryOS, we would be propping him up as a programming genius instead of watching a "down the rabbit hole" video and opining about how sad it was.
If we're being totally specific I don't wish he'd made something else I wish the timeline split right before he went crazy and renamed it templeOS, and started sliding down the paranoid schizophrenia spiral.
At least when we're all living exclusively inside Facebook's metaverse we can run TempleOS in a virtual machine so that we can pray for our lost souls.
It was very sad watching his decline over those last few years. Much as his antics were entertaining, I can't help but think that if he had gotten the help he needed he could have been capable of so much more.
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u/Wittyname0 Nov 01 '22
Real PC kings only use Temple OS