This is so late, and few people on this forum will know who this is, but I just found out
Terry Davis died in a train accident in August. The man was a legend in computing circles. Schizophrenic, autistic, and deeply religious, this guy
worked on building an entire operating system for twelve years because God told him it would be the Third Temple. Terry Davis frequently got himself banned from programming forums due to inexplicably hostile behavior, replete with (bizarrely out of place) racism and homophobia. His mental illness caused him numerous issues throughout his life and he was in and out of homelessness. He posted many, many videos online and had a small cult following, both out of mockery and admiration. Recently he took down his youtube videos to "stop littering the internet" and within hours he had been struck by a train while walking along the railroad. It is unclear whether it was a suicide or not.
Terry Davis' operating system Temple OS, despite being a product of insane delusions and an object of frequent mockery, was actually a technical feat and an inspired work. It resembles the homogeneous computing environments of Plan 9, Oberon, Genera, the various Smalltalk operating systems, etc. While not being the first to implement the ideas and principles those systems pioneered, it achieves them impressively well, and the fact that it was the work of just one person is amazing in its own right. For those interested,
here is a more technical overview.
Terry Davis lived an eventful life and it is a tragedy that it ended so soon. RIP.
