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Comment by Wololooo | Hacker News Reader

Obligatory Temple OS unhinged video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o48KzPa42_o

Joking apart, the whole thing was both an exercise in madness and genius. Sometimes I wonder what he would have done if he had not gone crazy. We will never know...

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He'd probably be writing poison pill generators for AI, obfuscation tools (in the vein of public key crypto, but using entirely plaintext, in a style similar to Cockney rhyming slang) for social media posting. He was pretty anarchistic and antiestablishment. I'm sure we'd still see that coming through.

> Sometimes I wonder what he would have done if he had not gone crazy.

At what point do you consider he had "gone crazy" relative to the development of TempleOS? Only when he committed suicide? Shortly before then? Last ____ years of his life?

Without trying to sound insensitive, I'd personally argue the entire OS was the byproduct of a "crazy" individual.

The inspiration may have been all "crazy" but the implementation was still really neat, and it takes a lot of effort and skill to get to the point he did before his death. The thing about people who lose touch with reality is that their efforts to create or express something often make no sense to the rest of us. TempleOS, however, works. Terry create an OS from scratch, an entire new language (or variant of a language) in the form of HolyC, and not only does it all work together in a way that requires no disconnect from reality, it works well for his goals and philosophy.

The entire thing may be the result of a person suffering from schizoaffective disorder, but that person still held a great deal of skill to implement that idea and enough of a touch with the reality of computer hardware to make it happen.

> TempleOS, however, works

But only in 640*480, without networking or usb. Oh and virtual memory is a government conspiracy so expect crashes. He also said the n word a lot

I'm aware. None of that has any bearing on whether or not his grasp on reality was firm enough to create TempleOS.

I took the parent comment to mean, what would Terry have made if he wasn't crazy and didn't make a God-themed novelty OS?

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