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If you haven't heard of him, he could only have been described as a 'mad genius'.
Looking at his work, I found myself astounded by the fact that if he hadn't existed, I would have sworn that what he did was impossible.
He made a full operating system.
At this point, before learning that he actually did this, I would have pushed for a number of corrections, and I would have been wrong.
You mean he made a new fork of Linux?
No! It's a fully new operating system!
So he wrote his own kernel in C?
No again! C was not good enough for Terry, so he created a new language, called Holy C, with new abilities, such as telling the computer what to expect from memory outputs, so they can be checked.
Okay, so he modified the C compiler with new features?
Wrong again! He wrote his own compiler, from nothing. Deus ex nihilo.
That's big, but an operating system needs more than a kernel. Did he manage to port existing software over to it?
He wrote his own software for it, including a text editor, a music composer, an RPG, and a 3D flight simulator.
Each of these parts - the software, the kernel, the compiler, has been written for other projects, and takes the work of many engineers, working for decades.
Terry's operating system, 'TempleOS' couldn't get the polish that other systems do. It didn't look as sleek. It might be described as the opposite of a MacBook.
However, it also wasn't a clone of existing operating systems. The icons for files and programs were 3D rotating objects. The entire thing could be run in RAM, as it required only 18 Megs.