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From: ritchie@hplsdla.HP.COM (Dave Ritchie)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: DAEMONs
Message-ID: <3550002@hplsdla.HP.COM>
Date: Tue, 25-Aug-87 11:41:25 EDT
Article-I.D.: hplsdla.3550002
Posted: Tue Aug 25 11:41:25 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 10-Sep-87 00:35:38 EDT
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Organization: Hewlett-Packard, Colorado Springs
Lines: 17



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