TempleOS: the strangest operating system ever created

Thinking of desktop PC operating systems, we immediately think of Windows, Linux or MAC OS, but in the hobby world there are hundreds of them with completely their own architectures and different from the standards we are used to. Never ever as strange as this: TempleOS is, according to the creator, "the third temple of God" and a means to communicate with the almighty.

Creating an operating system from scratch is certainly not a trivial matter. It's a project that requires a lot of knowledge, and apparently Terrence Davis, the developer of this project, has it. We are talking about a very basic 64-bit operating system , and among the features it has support for 2D and 3D graphics on displays with 640 × 480 resolution. It was written in a programming language he created and called HolyC .

But where did the idea come from? According to the author it is not his, but he has been entrusted with the task of creating it by God. And you can also download it from the official website .

TempleOS: the strange story behind its creation

Around 1996 Terrence Davis, who was an American programmer, began to suffer from manic episodes . These manic episodes were then diagnosed as events related to episodes of schizophrenia, with associated hallucinatory episodes. Among these episodes, we find some focused on aliens, then government plots and in particular relating to the Men in Black, conversations of various kinds with electronic objects, until, at a certain point, his disturbances began to take a "sacred" turn ”, Becoming a believer again and convinced by the continuous conversations with the almighty.

At one point, God assigns him a mission: to write the operating system of the third temple . Why the third one? Because the other two are, in order, the temple of Solomon and its reconstruction after its destruction by the Babbilonese.

And so was born "J Operating Systems", which then became "LoseThos", later called "SparrowOS" to become what we all know today as "TempleOS", an operating system composed of 100,000 lines of code, certainly too many for one person and then we realize how it was a really exhausting job for him.

The works began in 2003 and ended in 2013 (the latest update was released in 2017), when the developer published the related notice on his website:

“God's temple is finished. Now, God kills the CIA until it spreads ”.

The features of TempleOS and HolyC

As already mentioned, TempleOS is a 64-bit desktop PC operating system with multi-tasking, non-preemptive and multi-core support. It is in the public domain and therefore also open source and does not offer support for internet access.

The operating system has a 2D and 3D graphics library, which runs at 640 × 480 VGA with 16 colors. It offers keyboard and mouse support, and supports ISO 9660, FAT32 and RedSea file systems (the latter created by Davis himself) with support for file compression.

According to Davis, many of these specifications, such as the 640 × 480 resolution, 16-color display, and single voice audio, were taught to him by God. He explained that the limited resolution was to make it easier for children to draw illustrations for God. .

TempleOS was written in HolyC, a programming language developed by Davis. It originated as a middle ground between C and C ++, and therefore originally called C +. It also acts as a scripting language for the shell, allowing you to write and run entire applications without going through a compiler.

But obviously there is also the IDE , which comes with TempleOS, and supports various features, such as embedding images in the code. It uses a non-standard text format (known as DolDoc) that supports hyperlinks, images, and 3D meshes for embedding in what would otherwise be standard ASCII files. This, among other things, allows you to have source codes with a rotating 3D model of a tank as a comment inside it .

It might sound strange, but technical analysis is more than enough , and this underlines Davis' high skills as a programmer. Unfortunately, in 2018 a train hit him and ended his life.

The TempleOS article : The Weirdest Operating System Ever Created comes from Tech CuE .