[TUHS] daemons are not to be exorcised
Toby Thain
toby at telegraphics.com.au
Wed Mar 21 04:53:46 AEST 2018
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? :-)
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