Terry A. Davis

Terrence Andrew Davis (December 15, 1969 - August 11, 2018) was a programmer mostly known for creating TempleOS. This was an impressive undertaking, since Terry built everything from scratch, including programming language, editor, compiler and kernel. During his final years after finishing his main project, he regularly did streams and posted video blogs online.

Terry was fond of the Commodore 64, a computer he used when he was a teenager. Terry took inspiration from those early machines to build a modern operating system that was simple and exposed all of its inner workings to the user, making it very useful to tinker and learn.

In 1996 Terry started having regular manic episodes and one of them led to hospitalization. He was working at Ticketmaster at the time. His career was severed after he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, a condition that significantly impacted his life.

Terry was an atheist for some of his adult life but after experiencing a “revelation” he claimed that he was in direct communication with God and that God commanded him to build a successor to the Second Temple. Many believe that the original idea behind TempleOS was just to create a simple OS, and that later, the religious references where added. This is reinforced by the fact that the project had many names during its development: J Operating System, LoseThos and SparrowOS.

Terry remained mostly lucid when discussing computer-related subjects, but normal life was a challenge. In 2018 he was struck by a train at age 48 while walking along a railroad. Leading to the tragic event, Terry kept doing livestreams/video-blogs and it was very sad to see how his mental state and lucidity was rapidly deteriorating. It is not clear if his death was accidental or suicide.

He was an incredibly brilliant man that suffered from mental illness. If you have the time I really recommend watching Fredrik Knudsen video and reading the 256kilobytes Biography of Terry A. Davis.