Terry A. Davis

TempleOS was conceived by Davis in the early 2000s and developed over the course of a decade. Terry designed and built all of its stack from scratch, including its original programming language, editor, compiler and kernel. It is composed of over 100.000 lines of code.

There are many biblical references in the OS and according to Terry, many of the OS's features such as its 640x480 resolution and 16-color display were explicit instructions from God.

Terry built the OS inspired by early systems such as the Commodore64 he used as a teenager. It is built to be easy to tinker with low level programming. I higly recommend to read Codersnotes: A Constructive Look At TempleOS.

• Unique programming language: Holy-C.
• Holy-C also used for the shell. Commands go directly into the compiler.
• Hyperlink system built into the shell.
• Hypertext system: DolDoc
• Only support for the core system components of an IBM Compatible PC: VGA graphics, PC speaker, no networking.
• All system runs at ring 0. No multiuser, no file permissions.

TempleOS is very easy to install and works well on VM Hypervisors such as VMWare, VirtualBox and QEMU/KVM. In fact, Terry was seen many times running TempleOS inside a VMWare VM in his Ubuntu machine. To install, simply hit Y a couple of times and it will install. Make sure to give it at least 512MB of RAM and take into account that it is 64-bit.

If you want to run it on real hardware, your options are more limited because it only supports the most basic IBM PC hardware: it relies on hard-coded IRQ numbers, VGA 640x480 graphics, the PC speaker and PS/2 input devices.

I highly recommend Christine Dodrill post for a full installation guide.