A colleague of mine shared a video with me, and it got me thinking. The video was an interview with Terry Davis, talking about his views on computer programming and his operating system, Temple OS. It is a recording of an interview live streamed from a McDonalds, which includes five minutes of camera phone setup and curious passers-by snooping at the phone screen. So this must have been recorded in the early times of camera phones.
What struck me, though, was the intensity of his lucid moments in the interview. Not all of the time is like that, he clearly has trouble with focus and often teeters off into indirect abuse of uneducated programmers or loses his thread altogether.
Those lucid moments have coalesced enough for him to have created an entire operating system – much more than the manic episodes of my own youth ever gifted me. The more I read about him, the more I wondered what could have become of his operating system if he hadn’t suffered so much from schizophrenia and instead had been able to create a community around his OS. It would have required him to consider how to break a system into parts that could interface to each other, he took comfort from his ability to hold the whole thing in his head during those manic phases, and that gave him agility within his small domain. Letting others in to that domain would have been very uncomfortable and would, I’m sure, have let out the wilder side of his mental condition.
Sadly he came to a tragic end of his own making while walking along a railway track, shortly after filming a slightly disjoint goodbye message, and having been homeless for a few years.
The things I have been thinking about are how he was right about Linux, and what happened to my own mania.
He was very critical of Linux, I was somewhat disappointed with this video, titled “Brutal Take Down of Linus Torvalds”, there was no brutality to it, as far as I could tell. It was merely a walkthrough of some of the poor design decisions Linux has made – there are many more that I am aware of. The kernel community seems to me to be a lot of very clever people who have no idea what they are doing, and doing it with such vigour that no-one in the outgroup could possibly understand. It is emblematic of the worst ‘software engineering’ practices I have seen.
What interested me, though, was considering the other options, what would happen if we built an operating system around opposites of the criticisms? Could that be viable? Is that what The Herd was trying to do? Whatever happened to that?
As for my own mania, where did it go? I never really thought of it like that at the time, there were streams of ideas, some implemented more than others, back in the times when the future was bright. I am now struggling under a significant weight, of tiredness, of responsibility, of age. I want to recapture some of the joy I felt in those days, but don’t know how.
I don’t kid myself, there is no way I could write an OS, not these days, there was a time when I would have considered it, back when I got the manual for the 386 instruction set. And anyway, whether I wanted it or not such an OS would end up being called Neilix, which would be terrible for all concerned.
Part of the aim of reviving this blog is to have a place to capture these episodes. Nowadays they are mere minutes long, I don’t have hours to get lost in projects, never mind continuity over a series of sessions. Blog posts themselves can be suitable sizes, and I want to learn how to write, to bend the language to my command, ten paragraphs at a time.