>>13518214I'm a programmer, and I learned assembly language programming back in the MS-DOS days. TempleOS is not a product of remarkable skill, but of ordinary skill applied to a bizarre and pointless task. I've made my own languages and some Just-In-Time compilers. I've written low-level VGA graphics code that didn't use anything provided by the operating system. I've done most of the things he's done, just spread into a variety of projects done for various reasons, not concentrated into one schizophrenic absurdity I expected to bring me fame and glory.
The level he was working on wasn't especially impressive, it only requires basic programming competence and patience. For instance, he used cooperative multitasking rather than pre-emptive. That means the programs had to call a routine to give control back to the kernel so it could let another program run for a while. If one gets stuck in an infinite loop, the whole system freezes. Also, every program can access every other program's memory, and that of the OS itself, there's no protection from a badly behaved program, either accidental or hostile.
If he had learned about the advanced features of the CPU, he could have implemented pre-emptive, memory-protected multitasking like basically every real OS does, which doesn't require any cooperation from the programs, but stops them on a timer so the kernel can grab back control regardless of what a program's doing, and you can recover from things like infinite loops in one application. But he didn't learn the advanced stuff, he only learned basic assembly language programming, like from beginner-level books.
TempleOS is like a bunch of fairly ordinary student projects put together into one megaproject.
