[TUHS] daemons are not to be exorcised

[George Michaelson]

we call them "busses" because back in the day, real electrical
engineers called any huge solid carrier of signal or power a bus line,
because it looked like the way trolly busses got their power.

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?

data bus cables used to be the size of a moderate Dr Who Scarf, and
just as colourful. Now we're all settled on terahertz speed 2 wire
protocols or even one-wire, Its all a bit moot. At least we still talk
about the backplane, but usually now, its connecting the edge of a CPU
cluster, to the combination of power and a switch fabric. I dont think
people assume a computer spans more than one card any more, unless its
Intel struggling to fit the CPU on one chip, mounting two chips side
by side and then spreading the power budget into two lines on the bus.
Oh dear..

I got given the last generation PDP-11 on a chip, in a 72pin DIP. I
gave it to somebody else who could use it. At the time, I thought it
was Teh Awesome l33t to have an entire pdp11 on one chip. imagine! my
god, the power, the power. I think the day is coming when a CPU has
gold pins top and bottom. they have a very large number of pins.
Somebody smart will have to invent code to work out how to wire the
pins. Oh, hang on, thats why Djikstra's algorrithm which lies at the
heart of routing protocols was written back in the day. oh dear.. its
turtles all the way down isn't it?

On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 5:48 PM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/19/18, A. P. Garcia <a.phillip.garcia at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I've noticed that
>> more recent implementations of init have shunned the traditional
>> terminology in favor of the more prosaic word "services". For example,
>> Solaris now has SMF, the Service Management Facility, and systemd, the
>> linux replacement for init, has services as well. It makes me a little sad,
>> because it feels like some of the imaginativeness, fancifulness, and
>> playfulness that imbue the Unix spirit are being lost.
>>
> The term "daemon" doesn't go down very well with some Christians.  I
> know of hackers wearing clothing depicting the BSD daemon being
> hassled in Texas and other places in the deep South.  Replacing
> "daemons" with "services" is probably a concession to the fundies.  I
> agree it's rather sad.
>
> -Paul W.