[TUHS] FORTRAN

[Charles Anthony]

On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 7:51 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

>     > From: "Steve Johnson"
>
> So, I have this persistent memory that I read, in some early Multics
> (possibly
> CTSS, but ISTR it was Multics) document, a footnote explaining the origin
> of
> the term 'daemon'. I went looking for it, but couldn't find it in a 'quick'
> scan.
>

>From multician.org: http://multicians.org/mgd.html:

" daemon

A beneficent spirit. A process, not associated with a human operator, that
runs all the time and waits for requests to do something for a user. This
term is respectable English; the application to computer processes is
usually credited to M. J. Bailey, working on the design of CTSS in the
early 60s.

[JHS] "I'm working from memory here, but I think this is the story.
Although the word 'process' wasn't in the vocabulary yet, we had just
figured out that what one would now call 'system processes' were a solution
to several problems, and we were looking for a good label for them. A
British gentleman named Michael (Mick) Bailey, working on the CTSS
programming staff at MIT, suggested the word 'daemon' and quoted the OED in
support of both the meaning and spelling. Bailey's etymology was so
impeccable that questions as to whether the spelling should be simplified
to 'demon' went on for only about 30 seconds. On both CTSS and Multics, the
documentation and the process names use the spelling 'daemon.' I suspect
that the date on the memo that first used the term would be in 1962 or
1963."(note to Kirk McKusick, 24 Aug 1988)"

-- Charles
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