TempleOS is the work of the late Terry A. Davis. The operating system was created as “God’s temple” and features a lot of Christian references. It also features no networking, 16 colors and a 640x480 display. His reasoning for the outdated resolution was that God told him to make it that way.
Davis made everything in the operating system by himself, and even has his own version of C, called HolyC. He thought of himself as the best programmer in the world, and claimed he was chosen by God to make his temple. He even claimed he was better than the Pope as Davis had written a compiler, which the Pope hasn’t.
Davis suffered from severe schizophrenia and thought the CIA was coming for him and controlling his life. He even stated once that he felt like his life was like The Truman Show, where Truman lived in a world where everyone were actors and his life was broadcasted on TV without his knowledge.
TempleOS can be quite confusing if you don’t know what you’re doing. The operating system greets you with this screen the first time you boot it.
After installing and rebooting, you’re greeted by the bootloader. Davis didn’t like Linux and GRUB, and instead wrote his own bootloader. It looks quite basic, but it works.
After booting you get a choice of going through a tour of the system. I would recommend doing this as it is a good way of learning the quirks of the system. The most important part is to learn the basics of HolyC, as that is what the terminal uses. The commands in the terminal is using HolyC, and knowing the methods is key.
The biggest thing about HolyC is that any method that doesn’t have any arguments don’t need parentheses to be called. This means that methods like Dir(); and Cd(); will be run using Dir; and Cd; . These two commands are really nice to know as they are the commands you’ll want to use the most.
To navigate the system, you use Cd("[folder]"); and use Dir; to list the contents of the folder.
The folder structure reminds me a lot of Windows, as it has drives like C:, but instead of the structure being C:\FolderName , using backslashes, it instead uses forward slashes, like Linux (C:/FolderName, like Linux’ /FolderName/SubFolder)
I mentioned that the operating system has references to Christianity, as Davis was a Christian himself (though arguably not the best one, since he constantly used slurs and swore). For example, hitting Shift+F7 , you’ll get a snippet from the Bible, and hitting F7 alone gives you “words from God”, which is just a random word generator, and Davis used this a lot himself, as he thought the words were from God, who “spoke” to him regularly using this method.
From my usage of TempleOS, I can say that it’s not very usable. Firstly, I don’t know too much about how to use the system, especially since it’s mostly terminal-based, and I also regularly hit snafus where certain things stop working. I can hit some buttons and suddenly stuff happens that I’m not too sure about, and some times I manage to get the right shift button to stop working. It’s fair to say that the operating system isn’t really meant to be used, it’s way too buggy to use regularly. The thing I like the most about the system is that it’s 100% open source, and you can view the source from inside the operating system, located in the C:/Adam folder.
In my honest opinion, this operating system is really only a curious project, and not something anyone would use. It’s way too plain and way too confusing. It also has a bit of a steep learning curve, and not very fun to use. I have dealt with terminal-only operating systems before, like MS-DOS, and have found some use from that, but TempleOS is not something I can find any use for. If you’re a curious person who wants to explore the operating system, the website is still up, including the downloads. The website is https://templeos.org/.
To end, I also want to link a YouTube channel which has archived a lot of Davis’ videos and livestreams, as his own channel got terminated a good while ago. The channel is called Temple OS Archive and you can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOFnEi5umi36nay4rppPW9A. I also would like to pay some respect for the late Terry Andrew Davis, who suffered from mental problems including severe schizophrenia, and who after a lot of trouble managed to get kicked out of his parents’ house and had to roam around homeless. In 2018, he was found dead in an accident, which is speculated to be a suicide. Rest in peace, Terry.
