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Terry A. Davis

If you havenā€™t heard of him, he could only have been described as a ā€˜mad geniusā€™.

Looking at his work, I found myself astounded by the fact that if he hadnā€™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! Itā€™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.

Thatā€™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.

Terryā€™s operating system, ā€˜TempleOSā€™ couldnā€™t get the polish that other systems do. It didnā€™t look as sleek. It might be described as the opposite of a MacBook.

However, it also wasnā€™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.