Terrence Andrew Davis (December 15, 1969 – August 11, 2018) was an American electrical engineer, computer programmer, and outsider artist best known for creating and designing TempleOS, a public-domain operating system, written in a programming language developed by Davis called HolyC. He believed God had commanded him to create TempleOS as the Third Temple prophesied in the Bible. In 1996, Davis began experiencing regular manic episodes, some of which led to hospitalization. Initially diagnosed with bipolar disorder, he was later declared to have schizophrenia. Eight months before his death, he struggled with periods of homelessness. His fans brought him supplies, but Davis refused their offers of housing. He recorded a video in which he said that he deleted most of his content to not make the Internet dirty and that he was extremely ill. In August 2018, he was struck by a train and died at the age of 48.
Terrence Andrew Davis was born in West Allis, Wisconsin, on December 15, 1969, as the seventh of eight children; his father was an industrial engineer. The family moved to Washington, Michigan, California and Arizona. As a child, Davis used an Apple II at his elementary school, later learning assembly language on a Commodore 64 as a teenager. Davis grew up Catholic.
In 1994, he earned his master's degree in electrical engineering from Arizona State University. On the subject of his certifications, he wrote in 2011: "Everybody knows electrical is higher in the engineering pecking order than [computer systems] because it requires real math". For several years he worked at Ticketmaster on VAX machines.
Davis became an atheist and described himself as a scientific materialist until experiencing what he called a "revelation from God". Starting in March 1996, Davis was admitted to a psychiatric ward around every six months for recurring manic episodes. He also developed beliefs centering around space aliens and government agents. According to Davis, he attributed a profound quality to the Rage Against the Machine lyric "some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses" and recalled "I started seeing people following me around in suits and stuff. It just seemed something was strange." He donated large sums of money to charity organizations, something he had never done before. Later, he surmised, "that act [probably] caused God to reveal Himself to me and saved me."
Due to fear of the figures he believed were following him, Davis drove hundreds of miles south with no destination. After becoming convinced that his car radio was communicating with him, he dismantled his vehicle to search for tracking devices he believed were hidden in it, and threw his keys into the desert. He walked along the side of the highway, where he was then picked up by a police officer, who escorted Davis to the passenger seat of his cruiser.
Davis escaped from the patrol vehicle and was hospitalized due to a broken collarbone. Distressed about a conversation in the hospital over artifacts found in his X-ray scans, interpreted by him as "alien artifacts", he ran from the hospital. He attempted to carjack a nearby truck before being arrested. In jail, he stripped himself, broke his glasses, and jammed the frames into a nearby electrical outlet, trying to open his cell door by switching the breaker. This failed, as he had been wearing non-conductive frames. He was admitted to a mental hospital for two weeks.
Davis was initially diagnosed with bipolar disorder and later declared to have schizophrenia. He felt "guilty for being such a technology-advocate atheist" and tried to follow Jesus by giving away all of his possessions and living a nomadic lifestyle. In July 1996, he returned to Arizona and started formulating plans for a new business. He designed a three-axis milling machine, as he recalled having 3D printing in mind as an obvious pursuit, but a Dremel tool incident nearly set his apartment on fire, prompting him to abandon the idea. He subsequently lived with his parents in Las Vegas and collected Social Security disability payments. He attempted to write a sequel to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), but he never finished it. Davis later wrote that he found work at a company named "Xytec Corp" between 1997 and 1999, making FPGA-based image processing equipment. He said the next two years were spent at H.A.R.E., where he wrote an application called SimStructure, and the two years after that were spent at Graphic Technologies, where he was "head software/electrical engineer".
After 2003, Davis's hospitalizations became less frequent. His schizophrenia still affected his communication skills, and his online comments were usually incomprehensible, but he was reported as "always lucid" if the topic was about computers. Vice noted that, in 2012, he had a productive conversation with the contributors at MetaFilter, where his work was introduced as "an operating system written by a schizophrenic programmer".
Between 2003 and 2014, Davis had not been hospitalized for any mental illness-related incidents. In an interview, he said that he had been "genuinely pretty crazy in a way. Now I'm not. I'm crazy in a different way maybe." Davis acknowledged that the sequence of events leading to his spiritual awakening might give the impression of mental illness, as opposed to a divine revelation. He said, "I'm not especially proud of the logic and thinking. It looks very young and childish and pathetic. [...] In the Bible it says if you seek God, He will be found [sic] of you. I was really seeking, and I was looking everywhere to see what he might be saying to me."
TempleOS is a biblical-themed operating system designed to be the Third Temple prophesied in the Bible. Known as J Operating System from 2004 to 2005, LoseThos from 2006 to 2012, and SparrowOS in late 2012, TempleOS is similar to the Commodore 64, DESQview and other early DOS-based interfaces, and was written in a programming language developed by Davis called HolyC, which is a middle ground between C and C++. Described as being more flexible than C, HolyC was conceived of by Davis in the early 2000s and developed alone over the course of a decade. TempleOS included the design of its original programming language, editor, compiler and kernel, and it ultimately had over 120,000 lines of code.
In 2005, Davis stated that his ambition for the J Operating System was to recapture the rapidly changing environment of the Commodore 64 era, as well as encouraging the creation of "odd-ball software." He envisioned the system as a Commodore 64 with greater processing speed. In 2008, he wrote that TempleOS was primarily intended to create video games, and that it has no Internet functionality, claiming that doing so would be the same as reinventing the wheel.
Davis proclaimed later in TempleOS's development that he was in direct communication with God, who told him to build a successor to the Second Temple as an operating system. As such, references to Biblical tropes are ubiquitous in the OS. One bundled program, "AfterEgypt", is a game in which the player travels to a burning bush to use a "high-speed stopwatch". The stopwatch is meant to act as an oracle that generates pseudo-random text, something Davis believed to be coded messages from God. He likened the process to a Ouija board and speaking in tongues. As an example:
among consigned penally result perverseness checked stated held sensation reasonings skies adversity Dakota lip Suffer approached enact displacing feast Canst pearl doing alms comprehendeth nought
According to Davis, many of the system's features, such as its 640×480 resolution and 16-color display, were also explicit instructions from God. The charter on his website stated that TempleOS was God's official temple and a place where offerings are made and God's oracle could be consulted, like Solomon's Temple. He used the oracle to ask God about war ("servicemen competing"), death ("awful"), dinosaurs ("Brontosaurs' feet hurt when stepped"), favorite video game (Donkey Kong), favorite car (BMW), favorite national anthem (Latvia's), favorite band (the Beatles), and the 11th commandment ("Thou shall not litter"). The idea of using a complex system to communicate with the supernatural world is not new and can well be called a unique practice of divination in general, which is characterized by deriving meaning from the random.