[TUHS] daemons are not to be exorcised

[bakul@bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah)]

On Tue, 20 Mar 2018 14:04:38 -0400 Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
Dan Cross writes:
> 
> On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 1:56 PM, George Michaelson <ggm at algebras.org> wrote:
> 
> I think daemon/demon came from printers demon, which is carved into
> > the government printing office in Brisbane. the printers demon is the
> > one which stuffed up letters in the tray, to make printers tear their
> > hair out. Did I say tray? I meant case, upper case, the one above,
> > with the big letters, and lower case, the case with the little
> > letters. oh dear. really? is that why they are cases?
> >
> 
> While this story (and the others I trimmed for brevity) is (are) great,
> "daemon" is actually from the Greek, I believe: an intermediary between
> humans (users) and the gods (the kernel).

From http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Daemon.html

  Fernando J. Corbato: ... Our use of the word daemon (@
  Project MAC in 1963) was inspired by the Maxwell's daemon of
  physics and thermodynamics. (My background is Physics.)
  Maxwell's daemon was an imaginary agent which helped sort
  molecules of different speeds and worked tirelessly in the
  background. We fancifully began to use the word daemon to
  describe background processes which worked tirelessly to
  perform system chores.