I don't have a dog in this fight, but some context might be useful to those who didn't instantly recognize this as I did:
This is a from-scratch operating system by LoseThOS, an absolutely brilliant but (allegedly) schizophrenic programmer who posts on HN but has been hellbanned countless times for the unintelligle religious rants and insults he posts.
This version looks like a rebranding of LoseThOS, the previous iteration of the operating system. It's worth Googling if you'd like more history.
SparrowOS is another name for the project. I find the author's hellbanned posts fascinating, at least when they aren't racist!! The project is quite an undertaking for a single human.
A nice cogent summary of the goals of the project:
"The main reason TempleOS is simple and beautiful is because it's ring-0-only and
identity-mapped. Linux wants to be a secure, multi-user mainframe. That's the
vision for Linux. That's why it has file permissions. The vision for TempleOS
is a modern, 64-bit Commodore 64. The C64 was a home computer mostly used for
games. It trained my generation how to program. It was simple, open and
hackable. It was not networked. The games were not multimedia works of art,
but generated programmatically with innocent, programmer (non-artist) quality
graphics. It was simple and unsecure. If you don't have malware and you don't
have bugs, protection just slows things down and makes the code complicated."
I know the author is a long-hellbanned hn user, possibly with some kind of mental illness.
But just out of curiosity, I downloaded the 24MB ISO from the website and loaded it up in a VMWare instance. It does boot...
It's an odd curses-like interface, with lots of blinking and scrolling. There are command-line looking things around, but all of the commands are kind of like C statements, like instead of 'cd ..' you have to do 'Cd("..");'. Really odd. There's a blue box that pops up possible completions, but it seems to have a whole dictionary in addition to commands.
Play with it if you have VMWare and you're bored, but I'd strongly recommend fully isolating it...
The entire OS is written in a language called C+ (now renamed to Holy C), it is an very interesting language in that it is just in time compiled. It's a mix between old school C and C++, taking some good/bad from both.
The entire OS runs in a single memory space, so processes communicating with each other is as simple as writing to that processes memory space and telling to go execute.
All of the .z files you find in the source tree directories are a gzip like algorithm that on the fly in the OS automatically unzips them, and then compiles the code contained within.
The interesting thing is that while the programs are generally just in time compiled, the main startup programs can't be, however you can easily change the OS and re-run the compiler, overwrite the already started OS and continue on. The compiler CAN write binaries but it is not recommended by the author.
And I may have spent entirely too much time in this ;-).
The author may be a schizophrenic, what he has built is kinda neat.
Will people here show some fucking respect? Using terms like "bat shit crazy" and "inane" are extremely selfish and only serve to make yourself feel better at the expense of someone who is disabled. You don't need to qualify statements. You can appreciate this for what it is and not comment on the author's disability and the negative effects of it. The sad truth is that what was done here is too far advanced for most of us so people can't comment on the actual content and instead decide to publicly humiliate a disabled person.
Agreed, this place can be really disgusting in its intolerance of mental illness. Backgrounds and persepectives represented in a tech/startup-specific community aren't bound to be the most diverse. Most people here are successful Americans.
losethos:
I did a flight simulator but it looks awful, at best.
Boot it in VMWare. Get someone else to run it. It's
called "/LT/Demo/GameStarters/EagleDive.CPZ" It's an
eagle diving for fish. It's just a demo mostly. I often
show restraint in making my demos simple.
East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94:
bro i think you can be proud of the flight simulator
you wrote for the operating system you also wrote
No, I will not pity someone who you, and or society may determine to be 'disabled' for one thing or another. I will appreciate TempleOS as much as the author's other works including the rants for they are one and the same, expressions of self. So guess what, this is an interesting piece of work, you know what else? I don't like being called racial slurs. I'm not going to show any respect for anyone who thinks they can call me or my brethren a racial slur, disabled or not. To tell me to respect someone like that IS insanity. So no, no respect given.
For me? This is unacceptable. Any technical project that is tied into religion is already, by definition, not for me. TempleOS and its weird language are already far off the scale of sanity.
Believe is something very personal and I never attack someone for that. Unless.. they try to spread it, claim that this madness is superior in some sort of way.
So - that guy here might have medical issues. That's really sad and I do believe that he's impressive as a programmer.
But this submission cannot judge the OS without the bag of insults and religious madness it includes. I'm close to invoke Godwin (hey, at least I'm German. Now that'd be new..) to convince you that "But that's a neat project" isn't good enough if the message, the whole idea behind that thing is totally, fatally flawed and unacceptable.
I'm not trying to insult the man behind the project. Still, the project itself is worthless and not even remotely interesting to me, _because_ of the man behind that project.
People start judging startups because of the CEO here everyday. We still have anti-MS zealots, that throw Bill Gates jokes around. This project isn't 'protected' from being considered inacceptable, just because the guy behind it has a medical condition.
I flagged the submission. I heavily disagree with your idea of appreciating a piece of work while ignoring the dangerous ideas and opinions the creator shouts out - even if no one _wants_ to listen.
Anyone trying to bring back the spirit of the Commodore 64 gets a +1 from me, even if they are batshit crazy. In fact, you have to be crazy to do a project like this.
First of all, a single day being equal to 32 bits - that's a nice touch right there.
Second, given the way most of the world reckons time (it is the year 2013, after all) seconds since Christ makes a lot more sense than seconds since 1970 ...
I really want to have a spare laptop on which I can install all kinds of weirdo OSes just to see what they're like, not for "real" use. I'm perfectly happy running Win7 and OSX but that's like being happy with vanilla and chocolate at Baskin Robbins! I need some kind of heavy-duty bootloader and partitioning agent, though. Any recommendations for a starting place?
The obvious choice of boot manager would be GRUB 2 [1] but Plop Boot Manager [2] is entirely sufficient in many cases and easier to install and configure.
You can partition the hard drive, real or virtual, with Parted Magic [3].
If the reason you want to go with real hardware is that something like VirtualBox doesn't feel transparent enough to you (i.e., there's a lot of magic that happens in the background when you configure it through the GUI) I'd suggest trying out QEMU first. It requires more manual configuration (you'll have to read the man page and find the right set of command line options to make it do what you want) but the end result is that you have a better understanding of the virtual hardware your guest OS is running on. Plus, the Cirrus graphics card it emulates by default is well supported by old software.
Virtualisation is the best option rather than booting, for most operating systems. Xen is a good option, most OSs will run well under it (though probably not this one). You can boot other stuff from USB instead of bootloader.
I love this project no matter in which iteration it's sent (just hate the inevitable wtf comments from those who don't bother to do the minimal dig-in) It's as if it was taken from some (good) psychological thriller/hacker movie. A genius schizophrenic writes an OS that will bring him closer to God, sprinkled with esoteric religiously sounded phrases throughout.
This project would greatly benefit from a Github repository and an appropriate issue tracker. But then again, Terry completely loses foucs of reality every now and then (this is partly because of his mental disorder) and goes on to a path of complete anhiliation, destroying everything he created. This happened a few times with documentation and supporting websites he put up.
Can't anyone of the fine folks here help him with that?
Why is this (re)posted now? Personally I find these kinds of submissions (just link to front-page of a old project) bit annoying as they provide no context for why it's supposedly relevant now.
Regarding schizophrenia/psychotic states and the religious connection:
People here do not realize this is what happens when your spirit gets crushed- the psyche regresses into a state where hope is the only thing left. That is where religion comes in, which is fundamentally the psyche's last grasp on reality by clinging onto hope in society. (Father, save me.)
The psychology involved is absolutely real, and the effects can be seen in any brainwashing victims who have had their will destroyed through deceit or betrayal. This is documented stuff- you can make someone schizophrenic. Ever been dumped by a girlfriend and felt "lost" for some time, losing some ability to reason? Congratulations, you have experienced damage to the psyche caused by emotional shock, otherwise known as "heartbreak." This is what religion is referring to through the metaphor of the "soul."
Furthermore, society has responded to this man's determination and faith in redemption, i.e. "God's Will." We're adjusting and slowly coming to accept his mental state and are beginning to appreciate the impressive effort put into his project. His faith is working, and in this we are both observing and are participating in the 'miracle' of faith, which is due to the emotional bonds that humans create.
We are pack animals like many others in nature, we create family units, and we are essentially structured just like the natural world around us despite what we like to think about ourselves- our conscious thoughts are produced by our subconscious, we're not in control, and we have no idea what the hell we're doing except chasing a vision of success. Success in what, exactly?
Religion is not what you think it is! It is not entirely pointless superstitious nonsense, it is an ancient way of describing the matters of the pull of emotion from the heart and the effects it has on the human psyche through abstractions and metaphor. It is very difficult to understand except through experience, because it's relying on a different state of the brain and attempting to describe feelings. People call it "wisdom" because that is the easiest explanation, since it is dealing with emotional states of the human mind that cannot be explained logically, only through abstract stories, warnings, and the like, same as Greek mythology (don't fly too close to the Sun). Thou shalt not steal, because the subconscious guilt may eventually damage your trust in yourself and you may be cast out from your peers. (i.e. the Kingdom of God.)
Likewise, Hell is a metaphor for what happens when you are lost in the world with a shattered psyche, with no social bonds to pull you back up. It is a terrifying fate, and it certainly happened thousands of years ago to men just as it happens today- where do you think the minds of the homeless pushing around shopping carts are?
Modern psychology (at least some of it) is essentially a scientific explanation of the situations and consequences that the ancients described in the Bible.
It is not literal, nor did that have any meaning when it was written. It is the "Word of God" as again, a metaphor, describing the nature of human beings and their common behavioral patterns leading to predictable consequence.
The Old Testament is essentially an ancient Almanac, containing metaphor about the creation and nature of the universe, orally passed down legends and tradition about the beginning of mankind, a history of the fate of various sects and tribes and family lines of man originating from Israel, and collections of poems, songs, and Confucian-like snippets of wisdom collected by kings.
The traditions, symbolism, culture, music, and weird mannerisms of the church (or any religion in any culture) are there for a reason. They are symbols that affect the subconscious and evoke emotion, the same way that subliminally seeing a fast food sign in your peripheral vision will make your stomach rumble, and the reason why all advertising works.
Described in an ancient way, this is magic. It's real, and you're exposed to it every day in both positive and negative forms.
The "house of religion" where participants submit into a particular culture of tradition gives humans in various situations and walks of life something to bond together with, creating a social family unit i.e. "children of God, flock, congregation, etc."
This feeling is subconsciously uncomfortable to the logical crowd like this one, which is compromised of young men driven by their very nature to break free of their parental family unit and create their own, while not realizing that is exactly what they are doing or where their ambition comes from. They are clinging to their confidence in themselves, and if that doesn't pan out, the only thing left to hold onto is hope in the compassion of your fellow man as a collective.
It is sort of like a recursive self-deception where people place their faith in their own emotions (God's name is Jealousy) which actually works and helps people pull themselves back out. Hard to wrap your mind around the illogical!
Let's not disappoint the man. He deserves recognition, and it is in our very nature to give him a hand and pull him out of his rut. Perhaps he will even find a woman to bond with, set up a steeple above their heads in "holy matrimony," and become a King himself.
I have no idea what you're talking about. Schizophrenia is a physical illness. Your brain physically deteriorates. You can't make anyone schizophrenic any more than you can make them lose an arm. In fact, making them lose an arm would be much easier than making them schizophrenic.
I haven't looked through it, but it probably means that you can access individual physical bytes in memory by using their physical address (there's a one to one correspondence between the physical address and the logical address of a byte).
I'm not exactly sure how that is achieved, as far as I know, in order to switch to long mode, you need to have enabled paging.
I've been myself looking to start my own OS (protected mode), but it will probably be a unix code. What this guy has done obviously deserves a lot of admiration.
[+] [-] aegiso|12 years ago|reply
This is a from-scratch operating system by LoseThOS, an absolutely brilliant but (allegedly) schizophrenic programmer who posts on HN but has been hellbanned countless times for the unintelligle religious rants and insults he posts.
This version looks like a rebranding of LoseThOS, the previous iteration of the operating system. It's worth Googling if you'd like more history.
[+] [-] jevinskie|12 years ago|reply
Edit: After watching this video, I understand the SparrowOS name (audio required): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tuXweEJNFI
[+] [-] andrewljohnson|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] archgoon|12 years ago|reply
"The main reason TempleOS is simple and beautiful is because it's ring-0-only and identity-mapped. Linux wants to be a secure, multi-user mainframe. That's the vision for Linux. That's why it has file permissions. The vision for TempleOS is a modern, 64-bit Commodore 64. The C64 was a home computer mostly used for games. It trained my generation how to program. It was simple, open and hackable. It was not networked. The games were not multimedia works of art, but generated programmatically with innocent, programmer (non-artist) quality graphics. It was simple and unsecure. If you don't have malware and you don't have bugs, protection just slows things down and makes the code complicated."
[+] [-] eck|12 years ago|reply
But just out of curiosity, I downloaded the 24MB ISO from the website and loaded it up in a VMWare instance. It does boot...
It's an odd curses-like interface, with lots of blinking and scrolling. There are command-line looking things around, but all of the commands are kind of like C statements, like instead of 'cd ..' you have to do 'Cd("..");'. Really odd. There's a blue box that pops up possible completions, but it seems to have a whole dictionary in addition to commands.
Play with it if you have VMWare and you're bored, but I'd strongly recommend fully isolating it...
[+] [-] X-Istence|12 years ago|reply
The language is fully documented too, see http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Doc/HolyC.html.
The entire OS runs in a single memory space, so processes communicating with each other is as simple as writing to that processes memory space and telling to go execute.
All of the .z files you find in the source tree directories are a gzip like algorithm that on the fly in the OS automatically unzips them, and then compiles the code contained within.
The interesting thing is that while the programs are generally just in time compiled, the main startup programs can't be, however you can easily change the OS and re-run the compiler, overwrite the already started OS and continue on. The compiler CAN write binaries but it is not recommended by the author.
And I may have spent entirely too much time in this ;-).
The author may be a schizophrenic, what he has built is kinda neat.
[+] [-] sillysaurus2|12 years ago|reply
He's said that networking isn't a goal of the project, as the OS is intended for gaming. So it doesn't have any way to connect to any network.
[+] [-] dschulz|12 years ago|reply
Oh, that explains very well what I was thinking about those bible cites..
[+] [-] chez17|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oinksoft|12 years ago|reply
For what it's worth, there is a far more interesting and respectful discussion from last fall on Metafilter: http://www.metafilter.com/119424/An-Operating-System-for-Son...
My favorite bit:
[+] [-] joyeuse6701|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darklajid|12 years ago|reply
For me? This is unacceptable. Any technical project that is tied into religion is already, by definition, not for me. TempleOS and its weird language are already far off the scale of sanity.
Believe is something very personal and I never attack someone for that. Unless.. they try to spread it, claim that this madness is superior in some sort of way.
So - that guy here might have medical issues. That's really sad and I do believe that he's impressive as a programmer.
But this submission cannot judge the OS without the bag of insults and religious madness it includes. I'm close to invoke Godwin (hey, at least I'm German. Now that'd be new..) to convince you that "But that's a neat project" isn't good enough if the message, the whole idea behind that thing is totally, fatally flawed and unacceptable.
I'm not trying to insult the man behind the project. Still, the project itself is worthless and not even remotely interesting to me, _because_ of the man behind that project.
People start judging startups because of the CEO here everyday. We still have anti-MS zealots, that throw Bill Gates jokes around. This project isn't 'protected' from being considered inacceptable, just because the guy behind it has a medical condition.
I flagged the submission. I heavily disagree with your idea of appreciating a piece of work while ignoring the dangerous ideas and opinions the creator shouts out - even if no one _wants_ to listen.
[+] [-] integraton|12 years ago|reply
See the following thread of comments on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1aqdxn/temple_o...
This is essentially the equivalent of "outsider art" in the technology world.
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cromwellian|12 years ago|reply
Here's to the crazy ones.
[+] [-] dylz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsync|12 years ago|reply
First of all, a single day being equal to 32 bits - that's a nice touch right there.
Second, given the way most of the world reckons time (it is the year 2013, after all) seconds since Christ makes a lot more sense than seconds since 1970 ...
[+] [-] oscilloscope|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icelancer|12 years ago|reply
Do yourself a favor: Turn on showdead in options and browse a bunch of threads. You will see his markov chain generator going nuts, plus his rants.
[+] [-] givehimagun|12 years ago|reply
He also believed his code was bulletproof and never needed changing/refactoring. He was a team culture killer.
[+] [-] devindotcom|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] networked|12 years ago|reply
You can partition the hard drive, real or virtual, with Parted Magic [3].
If the reason you want to go with real hardware is that something like VirtualBox doesn't feel transparent enough to you (i.e., there's a lot of magic that happens in the background when you configure it through the GUI) I'd suggest trying out QEMU first. It requires more manual configuration (you'll have to read the man page and find the right set of command line options to make it do what you want) but the end result is that you have a better understanding of the virtual hardware your guest OS is running on. Plus, the Cirrus graphics card it emulates by default is well supported by old software.
[1] One good option is to use http://www.supergrubdisk.org/super-grub2-disk/.
[2] http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/
[3] http://partedmagic.com/doku.php
[+] [-] S4M|12 years ago|reply
Actually, is there somewhere a list of all the weirdo OSes? I'd be interested to see that.
[+] [-] justincormack|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diek|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjaerv|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krelian|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orclev|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meowface|12 years ago|reply
He is a great programmer, though, and his work shouldn't be discounted just because he's a bit off.
[+] [-] trafficlight|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fosap|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AccordionGuy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Iuz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seunosewa|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pearjuice|12 years ago|reply
Can't anyone of the fine folks here help him with that?
[+] [-] koala_advert|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zokier|12 years ago|reply
edit: here is some background info for those who are not familiar with this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4992749
[+] [-] bobsgame|12 years ago|reply
People here do not realize this is what happens when your spirit gets crushed- the psyche regresses into a state where hope is the only thing left. That is where religion comes in, which is fundamentally the psyche's last grasp on reality by clinging onto hope in society. (Father, save me.)
The psychology involved is absolutely real, and the effects can be seen in any brainwashing victims who have had their will destroyed through deceit or betrayal. This is documented stuff- you can make someone schizophrenic. Ever been dumped by a girlfriend and felt "lost" for some time, losing some ability to reason? Congratulations, you have experienced damage to the psyche caused by emotional shock, otherwise known as "heartbreak." This is what religion is referring to through the metaphor of the "soul."
Furthermore, society has responded to this man's determination and faith in redemption, i.e. "God's Will." We're adjusting and slowly coming to accept his mental state and are beginning to appreciate the impressive effort put into his project. His faith is working, and in this we are both observing and are participating in the 'miracle' of faith, which is due to the emotional bonds that humans create.
We are pack animals like many others in nature, we create family units, and we are essentially structured just like the natural world around us despite what we like to think about ourselves- our conscious thoughts are produced by our subconscious, we're not in control, and we have no idea what the hell we're doing except chasing a vision of success. Success in what, exactly?
Religion is not what you think it is! It is not entirely pointless superstitious nonsense, it is an ancient way of describing the matters of the pull of emotion from the heart and the effects it has on the human psyche through abstractions and metaphor. It is very difficult to understand except through experience, because it's relying on a different state of the brain and attempting to describe feelings. People call it "wisdom" because that is the easiest explanation, since it is dealing with emotional states of the human mind that cannot be explained logically, only through abstract stories, warnings, and the like, same as Greek mythology (don't fly too close to the Sun). Thou shalt not steal, because the subconscious guilt may eventually damage your trust in yourself and you may be cast out from your peers. (i.e. the Kingdom of God.)
Likewise, Hell is a metaphor for what happens when you are lost in the world with a shattered psyche, with no social bonds to pull you back up. It is a terrifying fate, and it certainly happened thousands of years ago to men just as it happens today- where do you think the minds of the homeless pushing around shopping carts are? Modern psychology (at least some of it) is essentially a scientific explanation of the situations and consequences that the ancients described in the Bible.
It is not literal, nor did that have any meaning when it was written. It is the "Word of God" as again, a metaphor, describing the nature of human beings and their common behavioral patterns leading to predictable consequence. The Old Testament is essentially an ancient Almanac, containing metaphor about the creation and nature of the universe, orally passed down legends and tradition about the beginning of mankind, a history of the fate of various sects and tribes and family lines of man originating from Israel, and collections of poems, songs, and Confucian-like snippets of wisdom collected by kings.
The traditions, symbolism, culture, music, and weird mannerisms of the church (or any religion in any culture) are there for a reason. They are symbols that affect the subconscious and evoke emotion, the same way that subliminally seeing a fast food sign in your peripheral vision will make your stomach rumble, and the reason why all advertising works. Described in an ancient way, this is magic. It's real, and you're exposed to it every day in both positive and negative forms.
The "house of religion" where participants submit into a particular culture of tradition gives humans in various situations and walks of life something to bond together with, creating a social family unit i.e. "children of God, flock, congregation, etc." This feeling is subconsciously uncomfortable to the logical crowd like this one, which is compromised of young men driven by their very nature to break free of their parental family unit and create their own, while not realizing that is exactly what they are doing or where their ambition comes from. They are clinging to their confidence in themselves, and if that doesn't pan out, the only thing left to hold onto is hope in the compassion of your fellow man as a collective. It is sort of like a recursive self-deception where people place their faith in their own emotions (God's name is Jealousy) which actually works and helps people pull themselves back out. Hard to wrap your mind around the illogical!
Let's not disappoint the man. He deserves recognition, and it is in our very nature to give him a hand and pull him out of his rut. Perhaps he will even find a woman to bond with, set up a steeple above their heads in "holy matrimony," and become a King himself.
[+] [-] callmeed|12 years ago|reply
I don't think that's true.
[+] [-] sillysaurus2|12 years ago|reply
I have no idea what you're talking about. Schizophrenia is a physical illness. Your brain physically deteriorates. You can't make anyone schizophrenic any more than you can make them lose an arm. In fact, making them lose an arm would be much easier than making them schizophrenic.
[+] [-] kghose|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymousDan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ekr|12 years ago|reply
I'm not exactly sure how that is achieved, as far as I know, in order to switch to long mode, you need to have enabled paging.
I've been myself looking to start my own OS (protected mode), but it will probably be a unix code. What this guy has done obviously deserves a lot of admiration.
[+] [-] alepper|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]