BSD Daemon origins
Bryan D. O'Connor
(Since there is no "alt.folklore.computers.cute-little-mascots"
this must be the place...)
What is the origin of the little "daemon/devil" on the covers
of the BSD Manuals? (Drawn by John Lasseter)
..............................................................................
Bryan D. O'Connor : 6718 Delor Street : "Mistakes were made"
br...@wugate.wustl.edu : Saint Louis, MO 63109 : --your favorite political
Washington University : (314) 481-0445 : leader of the '80s
Dave Gillespie
> What is the origin of the little "daemon/devil" on the covers
> of the BSD Manuals? (Drawn by John Lasseter)
I don't have a copy handy but as I recall his pitchfork is just touching
the aura surrounding the word UNIX. So obviously he's a daemon forking
a Unix shell!
-- Dave
--
Dave Gillespie
256-80 Caltech Pasadena CA USA 91125
da...@csvax.cs.caltech.edu, ...!cit-vax!daveg
Don Stokes
> (Since there is no "alt.folklore.computers.cute-little-mascots"
> this must be the place...)
>
> What is the origin of the little "daemon/devil" on the covers
> of the BSD Manuals? (Drawn by John Lasseter)
No idea.
What I find kinda cute is the Pageswapper (DECUS VAX Sig newsletter)
mascot, the Cheshire Cat. The RSTS/E Sig newsletter has a mascot too:
a bulldog with a tail hanging out of its mouth, looking suspiciously
like that of the aforementioned Cat....
Don Stokes, ZL2TNM / / Home: d...@zl2tnm.gp.govt.nz
Systems Programmer /GP/ Government Printing Office Work: d...@gp.govt.nz
__________________/ /__Wellington, New Zealand_____or:_PSI%(5301)47000028::DON
Kim Toms
> What I find kinda cute is the Pageswapper (DECUS VAX Sig newsletter)
> mascot, the Cheshire Cat.
Yes, I thought of that cat first when James R. Ebright asked for a
mascot for the VAX Sig. For several years it appeared on tee shirts
and buttons at DECUS, is it still popular? In the first several
years, it disappeared partially each year. The reason I thought of
the cat was that it seemed to be a 'virtual' cat; ie only somewhat
there.
Steve Simmons
:In article <1990Oct19.0...@cec1.wustl.edu>,
:bdo...@cec2.wustl.edu (Bryan D. O'Connor) writes:
:|> What is the origin of the little "daemon/devil" on the covers
:|> of the BSD Manuals? (Drawn by John Lasseter)
:I did that. Or more precisely, I had it done. WAAAAAAYYYYY back when,
:the first joint East Coast/West Coast UNIX Users Group meeting was held
:in Urbana, Ill. I think that was about 1977 or so. I decided it would
:be nice to give Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie some nice token, so
:I called in a favor and had the (now rather famous) graphic artist
:Phil Foglio draw me some color art that had a PDP-11 frame with pipes
:all over it, and demons with forks running along the pipes. Visual
:pun. I had four shirts made, one each for myself, my wife, Ken,
:and Dennis.
:I left the artwork with the folks who made the color transfers for
:the shirts, and they sold several hundred shirts over the next decade
:or so. Evenually they went out of business and I reclaimed the art,
:and turned it over to Armando Stettner, then of DEC, so they could use
:a knock-off in the early Ultrix posters. I've never seen the art
:since, and I doubt many others have either.
There was rumor floating in the late 70s/early 80s that Phil was
seeking either credit, compensation, or both. It seems someone
redrew the shirt, added in some new DEC equipment, and DEC used it
in an ad campaign for Ultrix. I remember the ad and noticed Phil's
style immediately. Wonder if he ever got anything...
For the curious, Phil's gone on to fame and semi-fortune as an illustrator
for Donning/Starblaze and comic book artist with DC and First.
Arthur Evans
> Since it is daemon and not demon then the following definitions appear
> to apply (from Websters 3rd International Dictionary):
> 1. an attendant, ministering, or indwelling power or spirit
This thread has been about a daemon/devil on some BSD document which
I've never seen. Let me comment on the origin of the term "daemon" as
opposed to "demon".
The folks at Bell Labs who first did Unix had been using MIT's CTSS as
part of their work on Multics. CTSS had a process that ran all the time
to do various things; I now forget the details. It was called DAEMON,
quite consistently with the dictionary quote above.
Why not DEMON? CTSS ran on the IBM 7094, a 36-bit machine, and things
like program names used 6-bit bytes. (Lower-case letters? They came
later.) CTSS had a lot of ambivalence about whether such things were to
be right-justified or left-justified in a word. That is, was it to be
" DEMON" or "DEMON "? Well, the easiest way to avoid the problem was to
use a 6-letter name. qed.
Art Evans/SEI