From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: bakul@bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah) Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2018 11:24:30 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] daemons are not to be exorcised In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 20 Mar 2018 14:04:38 -0400." References: Message-ID: <20180320182445.5BBA8156E510@mail.bitblocks.com> On Tue, 20 Mar 2018 14:04:38 -0400 Dan Cross wrote: Dan Cross writes: > > On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 1:56 PM, George Michaelson 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.