It’s easy to dismiss Terry A. Davis as a paranoid, narcissistic, deranged and mentally unstable racist who spent 12 years of his life creating a useless operating system (TempleOS) to talk to god, but you really need to see the whole story before making a judgement. Terry’s story is a tragic tale of how mental illness took away the self proclaimed “greatest programmer to ever live”.

Terry A. Davis Early Life

Terry A. Davis was born on December 15th 1969 in West Allis, Wisconsin. But ended up living in Oregon, Washington, Michigan and Arizona in later life. He was part of a large family, he was the 7th child of 8 and his father was a industrial engineer, who worked on the Titan rocket system in the 70’s and early 80’s.

He grew up close to his siblings, but as an adult when the mental health issues began he states "Jesus did not talk to his siblings—he wanted nothing to do with them, strangers are better. I am the same way".

When Terry was a child he was put in a school program for gifted children and had regular access to an Apple II where his love for computing began. He quickly moved on to the commodore 64 where his natural talent became evident when he taught himself Assembly Language in the early 80’s.

Davis had a SAT score of 1440, and was a National Merit Finalist. He later boasted about writing a faster line drawing algorithm for his Commodore 64 than the one which came stock.

Terry A. Davis continued to program throughout high school and eventually enrolled at Arizona State University, where he got his Undergraduate and Masters degree in Electrical Engineering in 1994.

While studying for his undergrad, Terry was employed by Ticketmaster programming Operating Systems from 1990 to 1994 and was later moved to the research department from 1994 to 1996 where he built barcode readers and power supplies.

Terry left Ticketmaster when he decided he wanted to build satellite systems, forwarding his resume to many defense contractors through contacts of his father.

As a child Davis was raised as a Catholic, but later declared himself Atheist. “I thought the brain was a computer” Terry told Motherboard, He didn’t believe he had a need for a soul, but in 1996 he rediscovered God in a self-described revelation, stating in an email to Motherboard the experience was "a lot like mental illness ... I felt guilty for being such a technology-advocate atheist ... It would sound polite if you said I scared myself thinking about quantum computers. And then I guess you just throw in your ordinary mental illness."

In 1996 Terry A. Davis was going through regular and severe manic episodes. He suffered delusions of space aliens and government agents following him. He speaks about seeing people following him around dressed in suits but he was unsure if this was people researching him for jobs he had applied to.

As Davis continued to notice these men in suits following him, he began coming up with conspiracy theories. He was worried the government were concerned about him after he was designing some computer control systems.

Eventually Davis suffered an episode that left him driving his car 100’s of miles South, with no destination. He believed he was being guided by his car radio, which seemed to be commentating on everything Terry had done that day. As he drove further south, other conspiracy theories entered his mind and Davis became concerned about “big oil”, and their “suppression” of more efficient engines driven by water.

Davis ended up pulling over in the desert of Marfa, Texas and taking his car to pieces looking for a tracking device and eventually throwing his keys into the desert concerned he was being watched by the government.

Davis was picked up by a police officer who saw him walking alone along a road. He was asked to sit in the passenger seat by the officer but later jumped out of his moving car and ended up breaking his collarbone on impact. He was taken to a local hospital for treatment, where things got worse.

After being x-rayed he heard Doctors talking about “artifacts” that were found inside him, to the regular person these would be fragments of bone in your body from throwing yourself out of a moving vehicle, but to Terry A. Davis these were implants from aliens. Concerned what would happen after Doctors discovered his alien technology, he left the hospital and tried to steal a truck which was idling in the car park.

Terry was arrested and taken to jail, where he tried to open the door to his cell by breaking the arms off his glasses and sticking them in an electrical outlet to learn that they were non-conductive. He was rushed by guards and taken to a mental hospital.

After two weeks of being in the mental hospital, Davis was released. His stay was not without incident, he refused to eat food because of fear it was drugged and launched a chair through a window. On his release he wished to be like Jesus, he donated all of his personal belongings to Goodwill and delivered gifts to his nieces and nephews.

Davis says "Looking back on it, I'm not especially proud of the logic and thinking. It looks very young and childish and pathetic”. Later saying he felt guilty for being a “technology-advocate atheist” and he was inspired by Little House on the Prairie and the Amish to live a more simple life with God.

Terry A. Davis was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was later declared schizophrenic. This lead to Terry collecting disability payments. In July 1996 when things settled down, Davis moved back in with his parents with no money and very few belongings.

In 1997, living from credit cards and loans Terry A. Davis began building homebrew CNC machines and designed a 3 axis milling machine. These work in much the same way as a 3D printer, but hold a cutting implement and remove material rather then “print” plastic from a hot end.

Davis started the company “Home Automation and Robotic Equipment” (H.A.R.E) and worked on this for over a year building a prototype before realising that his machine had too many issues to become a consumer project.

While building this, Davis wrote CAD software that allowed the user to design and 3D model on their home PC, for the era this was very impressive.

In 1997 things go quiet, Terry mentions he took on more engineering work for another company. During this time Terry was still suffering from manic episodes.

In early 2000 Terry A. Davis returned, resurrecting a physics simulator he wrote in 1994 while studying for his degree expanding on the code he had already written. He named it SysSim. It outputted equations fed to it and wasn’t all that useful, but what it did do was familiarise Terry with computers again.

From 2001 until 2002 David was employed by a printer company as a contractor to develop microchips that allowed ink cartridges to be refilled. When his contract ended Terry took some time off before deciding to develop another product for H.A.R.E. Terry was going to launch his first OS, which would later become LoseThos.

From this period until 2008 it’s unclear how Davis was making money, during this period it’s believed that Terry was working full time on LoseThos.

LoseThos Operating System

In October 2008 Terry created the subreddit /r/losethos and user account with the same name. Terry began making consistent posts to various pages of the website losethos.com from computer programming related sub-reddits.

Some of these were made sense, explaining the OS was for people to have “fun” with. Explaining he developed the OS as an entertainment platform and didn’t want to (or ever intent to) compete with Windows or Linux.

However, Terry also made posts which were a little more confusing with titles such as:

Most of Terrys posts were in /r/programming where they were mostly ignored or downvoted. On the rare occasion that someone replied, it would generally be people confused asking what they are supposed to do or criticising the project, which often annoyed Terry.

The OS itself was written in a customised version of C (later known as HolyC). The OS was written by scratch by Terry and comprised of over 100,000 lines of code. Terry claimed creating LoseThos from scratch enabled him to create a clean break from the past and “innovate” because of this LoseThos had no compatibility with anything else. The OS was designed in 640x480 with 16 colours, which was a dated format. Even for 2008.

LoseThos was also at risk from attack from even basic malware and viruses, Terry simply got around this by never writing any network functionality. Ruling out any internet or LAN features. Terry also neglected to add the ability to print anything, meaning anything created on LoseThos would never be able to be shared with anyone else.

Because of this, Terry suggested running the OS with a modern OS such as Windows in a virtual machine. This just leads to more questions about why exactly LoseThos was created.

One of the features Terry added to the OS was called “Songs from God”. Lyrics would appear on the screen as the operating system played a 4 bit tune. This confused even more people.

While LoseThos may look crazy, dated and pointless you cannot take away anything from the achievement of a single man developing his own Operating System from scratch. The work that has gone into building this incredible, often compared to a single man building a skyscraper by users on Reddit.

As LoseThos was shared more and more by Terry he began to get feedback on his project, not all of which was positive. He also began posting in the /r/atheism sub-reddit, entering into long arguments with users which often comprised of random words or sometimes bible verses preceded with the words “God says….”.

Terrys need for conflict on reddit left him making posts attacking the idea of atheism, and when no one replied he would argue with himself, but reddit was not the only place he was posting.

Terry was known to post on OSDev.org, regularly posting about LoseThos and then belittling members who could not get it to run with arrogant and abusive posts which lead to many threads being closed or deleted. Around January 2009, the LoseThos account was banned.

In February 2009, Terry began posting in /r/programming more frequently. As more people recognised him he began to get more people replying to his threads wanting to learn more about LoseThos as well as Terry himself.

As Terry seems to have gathered more confidence to post there many users began to ask him to no longer post threads about every single update. Soon after this Terry’s account seems to have been restricted from making reddit threads in the programming sub-reddit, so Terry switched to spamming the comments fields instead.

Terry also began posting on HackerNews, duplicating his posts to get more attention. Terry would also hijack many threads and attempt to turn discussion in those threads towards LoseThos. Terrys patients appears to be wearing thin at this point, when a user criticised the graphics of LoseThos Davis replied with:

“You guys are all pathetic. You look at the graphics and conclude it’s not advanced…” followed by “I’m disgusted with you apes” and finishing with “You’re prolly linux cultists”.

Terry continued to post into 2009 and as people read more and more of his content they began to notice some inconsistencies in his content.

Previously Davis had claimed to have chosen 640x480 resolution because it allowed faster more responsive graphics, later on in 2009 he claimed he chose this because that is what God told him to do.

Users were also making fun of the fact that the features list included “Bible and hymmes” along with other religious features.

By the end of the year the reddit account /u/losethos was deleted, probably because it was banned from /r/programming and Terry created the account /u/TrivialSolutions (now deleted) and began posting from there, but his content became even more aggressive.

Terry also created shill accounts to post questions to /r/programming which resulted in him answering with replies claiming that LoseThos was the best solution.

Terry also continued to post to HackerNews for around 18 months to no effect, as his account was shadowbanned. People would only see his content if they turned on the ability to see [dead] posts.

In an attempt to evade his ban on OSDev.org, he joined again with the username TrivialSolutions but he was banned less than 12 hours later.

It’s around this time that Terry began to make YouTube videos for the first time, showing LoseThos and creating user guides and overviews. This allowed us to see and hear him for the first time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5z5XPT9vUgU

He also made a twitter account to share updates and news but with no real way for people to find him updates from these channels would slow to a stand still in 2011… But just as his hope was seemingly disappearing, he gained the attention of the Something Awful Forums.

A user called Jimferd created a thread detailing their experience playing with LoseThos, naming it “the very definition of Your OS Is A Piece of Shit” and sharing “everything in sight was blinking. Lesser men would have had a seizure from the install screen alone. After I finally gave up, I felt as though I had one”.

Upon going through the OS Jimferd detailed many of the features and games that LoseThos had, and then found a screen where Terry included his personal details such as phone number and address, as well as a history of the OS.

Jimferd continued to play with the OS, stating “the C+ language this uses is as much of an abortion as the OS itself”.

While LoseThos had become a bit of a joke online, this forum post with detailed instructions on how to install it made it much more accessible to others online.

It’s likely that Davis was aware of the thread as the next day he joined the Something Awful Forums complaining about a ban on OSDevs.org, where he was trolled with replies such as “God says, shut the fuck up!”.

With many avenues of communication with new found fans being closed it was going to be hard for Terry to grow a community around LoseThos, but as his mental state and coherentism decayed he found new “fans” elsewhere.

In 2011 Terry continued to post his random bible verses and occasional personal details on hacker news. It was revealed that he lived with his parents and was seeing therapists to try and help with his mental health issues.

It’s around this time that his mental health issues became very apparent, starting with a series of tweets aimed at the CIA.

He later encouraged people to hit CIA agents with cars, claiming to have ‘got one’ in 1999.

He continues to make these claims, stating people are fucking with him and he believes his parents (who he lived with at the time) were his enemies.

His posts on Hacker News also took on this anger and claims against the CIA, claiming his psychotherapists were CIA agents trying to screw with his mind. It was around this time in January 2012 that Terry began including racist words in his content. He was very fond of the word, “Nigger”. Often using it to describe the CIA along with anyone who criticised LoseThos.

His racist rants continued continued for a number of months and steadily got worse, but instead of ignore him users on Hacker News began to pity him and recognise that he may have issues.

And it wasn’t just HN users that felt this way, by this time he was still posting to reddit, posting to MetaFilter and stack overflow with the same aggressive/racist rhetoric. Claiming many times over that people are sending “agents” to fuck with him.

A post was made on MetaFilter titled “An Operating System for Songs by God” where seemingly someone had found LoseThos and decided to share it. Terry later found this thread and began replying, for 11 hours.

Davis made many claims in the thread, such as the CIA were to blame for the lack of innovation for OS design. Claiming he missed his chance because his OS didn’t have a backdoor and the CIA wouldn’t allow it to become mainstream.

He also seems to have shown people how he picks and finds his random Bible verses that he posts in all of his online content. This was his method of “talking with god” which he references several times. He believed this was a digital version of speaking in tongues.

If you have the time it’s an incredible thread and really shows where Terrys mental health was at the time. It’s around this time Terry shares that he was a 40-something year old man who lived at home with his parents, collected disability because of his schizophrenia and had been working on LoseThos full time for the last 10 years with the intention of somehow monetising it.

Through these posts Terry began to grow a small community online and began to get recognised around the web.

SparrowOS

In September 2012 Terry released SparrowOS. This was LoseThos launched under a new name. Social media accounts were created for the new brand as well as subreddit, /r/SparrowOS.

The SparrowOS brand would not be around for long and much of the story behind this continues the themes stated above. It was around this time though that popular “internet culture” forum Kiwi Farms discovered Terry giving him another boost in popularity.

In March 2013 Terry rebranded his OS for the final time, calling it TempleOS.

When TempleOS was released Terry created a matching Twitter account (later suspended) and a new website Davis really seemed to double down on TempleOS, releasing a large number of support documents for the project as well as many new games and features.

One of these games was called “After Egypt”, which Davis refers to as “the temple” and calling it “The most exciting part of the whole operating system”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ETqBJZudpw

Over next few months of TempleOS the website Terry created would change in unusual ways, the first major change coming in late June containing a video that is lost and the words “God’s temple is finished. Now, God kills CIA until is spreads.”

In September Davis changed the front page of the website again and the new purpose of the OS became apparent. This was meant to be used as a tool to speak with god.

Outlining the “After Egypt” game Terry believed using a timer as a random number generator to pick verses from the Bible would allow users to find answers to any questions. The next section of the website was some of the questions Terry asked God, along with his answer.

Starting on September 13, 2013 Terry also used the TempleOS website to share his thoughts in a section he called “Terry Davis’ Rants”. The first rant published on this day has several entries starting with some of the design choices (technical and devine) that made Terry create TempleOS the way it is.

But later goes on to display Terrys narcissistic tendencies announcing himself as “God’s chosen programmer” and “I am the best programmer on the planet”. He also went on to compare himself with those who wrote the bible and claimed nothing is impossible for him.

These rants and blog entries would continue for some time, ranging from just a handful of entries to some containing over a dozen rants along with God’s answers on a range of questions Terry had asked.

In October 2013, Terry launched a YouTube channel named after the operating system and began to create regular content and screen casts showing off the operating system. This is when Terry’s viewers would really begin to grow as people seemingly were happy watching his mental health decline.

The first videos were Terry showing the hymns which Terry had composed himself along with a brief introduction into the OS much like he did previously with LoseThos.

In late 2013 Terry added another section to the TempleOS website titled “demands” since that TempleOS was now “God’s Third Temple”.

These demands were a list changes aimed at Linux, Microsoft and Intel as well as other PC manufacturers to ensure TempleOS was supported and loaded onto systems as their default OS.

Terry starts off this page declaring himself “high priest” of TempleOS and stating that “I have divine authority to command companies in the computer industry to do anything to make God's temple more beautiful or perfect.”.

One of the demands were for Microsoft to support Terry’s “Redsea” file system instead of what it currently uses as well as the removal of SecureBoot so users could run both Windows and TempleOS, with TempleOS installed as default.

Another highlight was Terry demanding that Intel “A new TempleOS ROM is released every seven years. It gets burned into all new x86 chips in the Intel factory, for tamper-proof certainty in oracles and just because it's God's official temple and deserves the honor!“.

As we entered 2014 TechRepublic wrote an article highlighting TempleOS.

They commended Terry for showing dedication to such a project, mostly being very positive about the OS and bypassing issues such as Terry’s past behaviour and outbursts stating “Davis is a very open and very opinionated person”.

Terrys online rants and tweets seem to become even more clouded around this time as his mental health deteriorates.

It seems his paranoia was becoming worse.

In June 2014 Terry began posting YouTube videos again, one of these videos showed us how Terry had made his hymns and it explained why they sounded so odd. Terry’s method included taking numbers from a random number generator and running them through a program that interpreted these numbers as sound.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfMzl5S3pjg

Following several similar videos, Terry then believed he had the attention of Larry Page, a co-founder of Google creating personalised videos for him which were between 12 and 25 minutes long.

It was around this time that Terry’s video making seems to become a compulsion, making several videos that started with claims such as “I don’t know what to walk about” and random rants about atheists or critics of TempleOS.

In total, Terry went on to make 106 videos for Larry Page from July until August. These videos unraveled several things we didn’t know about Terry, he would speak about his politics and talk about how he was targeted by the CIA when they tried to sabotage his project.

A regular feature of his videos were 2 birds he kept in his home, he would often pause and only continue to speak when the birds were not singing. He also held the belief that he was above world leaders calling himself the “successor to Solomon” and calling those less intelligent to him “niggers”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoTYV22qZTg

Terry’s videos started to increase in length, some of them being recorded over several hours. This meant when Terry lose his train of thought he could land anywhere. The range of topics he spoke about was incredible and it would be impossible for me to cover everything in this article.

Because of this personal information about Terry became abundant and as more videos were made people became more aware of him and as a result his ego bloated.

It’s during this time that Vice (mentioned above) wrote an article about Terry, where he said “from 1996 until 2003, about every six months I would have what they call a manic episode and end up in a mental hospital” and “for those few years, I was genuinely pretty crazy in a way. I’m crazy in a different way, maybe.”

After this article and enjoying the increase in awareness from the people who read the Vice article Terry bagan making videos with his face on it and declared his position as “high priest of the Temple” stating “my job is to look after the code and do continuing offerings”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtuVZT-YsUo

His tweets during this time also became very erratic, again doubling down on his claim of killing a “CIA nigger” with his car as well as citing violence against them.

This downward trend continued, in November 2015 Terry had continued to post on the TempleOS website creating a new section called “Why the CIA must Surrender to the IRA” On this page Terry had started many posts as normal, with a rant about Obama, God and niggers.

Later on he wrote about Bill Gates and the CIA. Outlining various accusations of things they had done to ruin the nature of true computing and hiding the “real knowledge” of computer programming away from the public.

In February 2016, Terry relaunched the TempleOS website in the form that would be the most famous with its turquoise background. During the relaunch it seems Terry kept all previous content of the website, as well as including new areas such as “Terry’s Blog” which was a new and updated version of “Terry’s Rants”.

It was within this section that his most famous piece of writing was posted. It reads:

The Livestream Era

On March 16th 2016 Terry live streamed for the first time on YouTube. He did live offerings to god, read Hacker News, read the OSDev forums and read the blog of Dianna Cowern, also known as Physics Girl.

In the livestream Terry was very quick to call his critics and the CIA “niggers” and went on several strange ramblings telling the world about several of his conspiracy theories.

These livestreams again caught the attention of the Kiwi Farms users, bumping the original thread 2 years after is was posted saying “Massive necro because he’s even more hilarious now”.

Soon other forum members would take notice and give Terry the attention he craved. Terry’s livestreams became a daily occurance where he would share updates on his life, debug TempleOS on stream and talk about the CIA. Terry seemed to like streaming, in April 2016 Terry streamed himself for 12 hours, aided by Caffeine talking to the viewers through YouTube's live chat.

However, like the theme of this article as time went on Terry got even worse. He seemed to be losing his sense of reality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBgIBF9Y6PE

As the streams continued Terry brought up that he had tried reaching out to Dianna Cowern for help with programming the physics engine for his OS that was used for line drawing and games. He stated “I’m trying to convince a women that knows Physics to work with me, but I use the word nigger and she probably doesn’t want to be associated with that. She has sponsors and stuff.”

While he didn’t name her he had been reading her website Physics Girl many times on stream and viewers quickly worked out who Terry was talking about.

Terry was watching Dianna’s videos more and more. He had taken to regularly emailing her during livestreams and expressed how much he liked her content to his fans.

In late November 2016, on a livestream he received a surprise on stream when Dianna seems to have replied to one of his emails but quickly shut down the livestreaming before opening the message.

During this period users on the technology board on 4chan had found Terry. The majority of users seemed to enjoy Terrys content but a group of these people discussed phoning Terry during his livestreams to harass him.

This became very simple, as Terry had published his home phone number on his website and kept a phone handset next to his PC. Soon calls became a regular feature of the livestream and due to Terrys personality it was easy to anger him which was apparently their goal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5YokNW7tIs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVd0rlTeQtM

Over time, a number of these trolls decided phone calls were not enough and started pretending to be Dianna Cowern to exploit Terrys feelings towards her. While Terry was able to spot most of these as fake one of them managed to fool him, exploiting his loneliness for their entertainment.

As 2017 began Terry was struggling even further with his mental health. His content became even more incoherent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhXLReCv_dw

During this period Terry regularly spoke about consciousness, loneliness and when asked by a viewer “Who was he talking to?” on a livestream, went on a rant about how he “doesn’t know” and spoke about reality stating “If I had to guess my reality I would say I was in a mental program, with fake internet struggling to tell them it’s God but they don’t listen…”.

He also said he spent everyday doing the same thing, how he didn’t want to do the thing he was doing but didn’t seem to know what else to do. From the outside it seemed like Terry spent so much time working on TempleOS that he couldn’t stop.

As Terrys mental state got worse viewers would play on his paranoia and the live chat would regularly tell him to do things such as kill people like the CIA or ask for his opinions on subjects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9c0-ZC-4-E

Streams would however come to an end in March when his fake “Dianna” contact emailed him pornographic images that were shown on stream. This earned him a YouTube strike that disabled his livestream feature.

After this Terry went back to upload videos as well as streaming on hitbox.tv, but these streams were not archived on the site. Within 1 week of beginning to stream on hitbox his account was hacked, and when he made another account it took 1 day before this was also hacked.

This lead Terry to making a new kind of content, Vlogs. He would regularly sing heavy metal songs or go on walks to while talking to the camera. He would regularly call these “paloden walks” and said he was mainly recording these videos for Dianna, who he told the stream he was married to. It’s unclear if this was Terrys idea, or the fake Dianna emailing him at this point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wEZGPYiJ0c

Terry also created videos showing more of his living situation, showing fans and “Dianna” his room outlining just how few personal belongings he had.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdZ0gok5HfU

During these walks Terry used to go to a particular spot near his parents home in Los Vegas, during one of these outings when a black man was walking past him he said “hey nigger” while recording which happens towards the end in the below video. This caused a heated argument between the two.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQNZiLBuzEk

Shortly after this though his YouTube account was suspended for breaking the terms of service. Possibly for leaving hundreds of comments like this to his critics.

Terry began uploading videos directly to the TempleOS website which became very wild as he had stopped taking his medication, something he talked about before. Through July and August of this year he would turn very aggressive, drinking heavily and recording two videos of him arguing with his parents.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAVx9uj2bCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S75DN0joNPU

Over the next few weeks as the meds really wore off Terry began to lose sense with reality completely, all logic seemed to escape him and his content was showing it more than ever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TN266WkrPRs

There was a vlog where he spoke to his mother in a rude way, then stood there and stated “I don’t know why I did that, sorry. I need to figure out why I remembered why I love you”. This seemed serious and Terry was at his lowest point, but things were about to get bad for him.

On August 25th 2017 Terry was arrested on a domestic battery charge for beating up his father.

After spending some time in jail and then in a mental hospital he was no longer living with his parents and was homeless. His court date was set for October of that year. At this point Terry had set up a donation link on his website where users from 4chan and 8chan were supporting him.

6 days after being released, Terry was arrested again for “Open/gross lewdness”. Terry lated said this was for urinating in public. He was released shortly after.

Kiwi Farms were watching Terry's activity very closely after popular YouTuber Mister Metokur made a video about him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcqWok8AubE

During this period, living in a van his parents gave him he would stream directly on TempleOS.org from his vehicle. Soon his sister discovered of his situation and offered to pay for a hotel for him but this never turned into fruition.

In October, after skipping court Terry was a wanted man and posters were put up around Las Vegas. Within 2 weeks he was found and re-arrested.

However an unlikely source of help would appear, the owner of 8chan Jim Watkins helped raise money and pay for Terry’s bail, setting him free on November 10th set to be back in court in January.

He continued to make videos from his van, and also make content for Dianna who he still believed he was married to. Although at this point he was able to recognise something was not right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWUAF2M4km0

Terry also made videos of himself masturbaiting for her, uploading them to the TempleOS website in folders specifically for her. Terry also masturbaited on many livestreams and regularly watched porn as part of his stream, but as he was able to host these streams on his own website and servers he was able to do this without getting banned from anywhere.

Terry also struggled with his reality. He had several self aware spells where he realised he was not quite right, believing to be in some sort of prison similar to the Truman show but he would quickly return to the topic of Dianna who he believed would move in with him into his van.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-SJKJnZ9cg

In January Terry stopped streaming, members of the Kiwi Farms forums were following his court case to see if he had been imprisoned and checking for possible new arrests that would explain his disappearance. However, he never appeared for his January 18th court date.

https://i.imgur.com/zlunnjR.png

Later that month Terry uploaded a series of videos in an unknown house that never really explained anything but then disappeared again shortly after.

In March Terry started making content again from Portland, Oregon. 700 miles away from his previous location of Las Vegas, users online suspect his was living with a sibling and moved because of this but somehow got kicked out. It was never clear why he decided to move without his van or laptop.

This content was roughly the same as before, discussing a wide range of topics on religion as well as discussing his relationship with Dianna.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4uODGhR55A

Before long people aware of Terry began to track him down and post their interactions with him on Kiwi Farms. Some of these people would record their interactions with Terry in the forms of interviews and post them online asking him about programming and similar topics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2rpHdtj_Ic

One thing users noted from these interviews is how lucid Terry was when discussing topics such as programming and computers, verses some of his other interests like the CIA or religion.

However things would get worse, by May Terry believed his was in psychic communication with Elon Musk and General James N. Mattis designing new features for TempleOS. At one point even believing that Dianna had cheated on him with Elon Musk himself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFFH7npobH0

By August of that year Terrys ability to focus on one thing and speak properly had diminished. His speech was slurred and his general appearance and health had deteriorated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_0qKfbjzOM

And later that month, terrible news was found online. Terry died on August 11th 2018.

Terry had been hit by a train in The Dalles, Oregon. It’s unsure if it was an accident or suicide but shortly before the accident Terry published one last video and explained that he removed a lot of his content as he didn’t want to “pollute” the internet and referred to himself as “horribly sick”. This was uploaded hours before his death.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oH41gGBVpkE

At first people believed this news to be fake and posts on 4chan were made debunking this as a hoax, videos were even made collating this. The general idea was people had hacked the family members facebook account, but soon after news reports and emails to the police confirmed that this was not the case. It’s said the train driver believed it was a suicide.

Terry A. Davis Legacy

Upon hearing about the death of Terry, fans all over the world began posting tributes for him. Despite clearly living a hard life riddled with illness people remember the best parts and only wanted the best for him.

Many of these tributes can be found on /r/TempleOS_Official/ which still has an active community, sharing and mirroring all of Terrys content so it’s not lost. Fans of Terry also raised a lot of money for mental health clinics and charities in his name.

Many people following the story claim the internet helped make Terry’s problem worse. Even causing his suicide in many ways, however you could also argue that this is the way it was going to end and Terry in the most part received love and support from fans. Many of which offered him a room in their homes in his time of need.

We will never know everything about him and so much has already been lost. He was clearly a brilliantly clever and talented man riddled with mental illness.

RIP Terry Andrew Davis.

Additional Reading and Helpful Sources

• Kiwi Farms thread
• Timeline of Events
• Report of Death
• Terry A. Davis YouTube Archive
• Terry Davis YouTube Archive
• TempleOS YouTube Archive