
TempleOS
Terry A. Davis spent a decade alone writing an entire operating system from scratch, in his own programming language, on his own compiler, because he believed God had commanded him to build the Third Temple in code. The film traces his path from a promising young programmer in the 1990s to a man diagnosed with schizophrenia, cycling through hospitalizations, homelessness, and a devoted following of internet viewers who tuned into his live streams. Interviews and archival clips show TempleOS itself, a strange, biblically-numbered system built for a single user, alongside the online communities that alternately mocked him as "Timothy Terrance" and treated him as a folk hero. The film does not resolve the argument over whether Davis was a genius, a man failed by mental health systems, or both, and it does not look away from the trolling that followed him online until his death in 2018, hit by a train. What remains is the operating system, still running, and the footage of the man who built it talking directly to his camera about God.