ritchie@hplsdla.HP.COM (Dave Ritchie) (08/25/87)
Re Daemons (vs. demons) According to Webster's, a daemon was an entity that acted as an intermediary between the gods of Greek mythology and man. This spelling has been corrupted over the years into "demon" in some cases. I suspect that they use of daemon comes from its use on the DECsystem-10, where background tasks such as the line printer spooler, etc. were referred to as "daemons" (since they acted as intermediaries between the OS and the users). On our system at school, I can remember FILDAE (file daemon) which handled file protection and SATAN, the daemon used to which kill 'bad' jobs (i.e. jobs of a certain age that were connected to detached terminals). Dave Ritchie hplabs!hp-lsd!ritchie ritchie@hplsdla.hp.com
mccarthy@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu (09/03/87)
Written 1:02 pm Aug 28, 1987 by ba@pbhya.UUCP > About a year or so ago, someone told me what "DAEMON" > (not demon) meant. And I have forgotten it since! But it > was something along the line of Dynamic Access & Execution MONitor. > ^ ^ ^ ^^^ That certainly is a catch-all phrase, and one that doesn't seem to concisely describe what a daemon does. Could this be a case where the acronym was chosen before the phrase that it stands for was? :-) _____ _____ The Mental Midget {ihnp4, seismo, cmcl2, pur-ee} !uiucdcs!uiucuxe!mccarthy mccarthy%uiucuxe@a.cs.uiuc.edu "Just checking my hair for major geographical features" -D. Letterman
mberkley@watsup.UUCP (09/08/87)
In article <48800002@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> mccarthy@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes: > Could this be a case where the acronym was chosen before the phrase >that it stands for was? :-) Actually, I don't think that DAEMON is an acronym. According to the Oxford dictionary, when spelled DAEMON instead of DEMON, the word refers more specifically to benevolent, ministering, or helping spirits. That describes Unix daemons perfectly: friendly little processes that run in the background, helping us without requiring a constant beating into submission! (apologies to the purists - this is from memory :-) Mike Berkley, University of Waterloo ************************************************************************ *UUCP: {allegra,ihnp4,utcsri,utzoo}!watmath!watsup!mberkley * *Bitnet: mberkley@watdcs.BITNET * ************************************************************************
greg@xios.XIOS.UUCP (Greg Franks) (10/01/87)
We just had a talk from Susam L. Rosenbaum from AT&T. She was one of the originals on the Multics project. Daemon is term from that system. It is NOT an acronym. The guy that created those little processes that run around behind your back doing useful things was into greek mythology. I believe Multics predates TOPS-10 or whatever. By the way, the name 'cat' did not originate from 'conCATenate' despite what the manuals say...... (Hint: its a pun on GCOS). -- Greg Franks XIOS Systems Corporation, 1600 Carling Avenue, (613) 725-5411 Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K1Z 8R8 uunet!mnetor!dciem!nrcaer!xios!greg "Vermont ain't flat!"