[TUHS] daemons are not to be exorcised

[toby@telegraphics.com.au (Toby Thain)]

On 2018-03-20 2:24 PM, Bakul Shah wrote:
> 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.
> 

OK, but where did Maxwell get it? :-)