[HN Gopher] Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing
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Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing
Author : wizerno
Score : 197 points
Date : 2024-10-20 00:35 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.takeourword.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.takeourword.com)
| pzmarzly wrote:
| Interestingly, Safari Reader View doesn't work on this page.
| Firefox's does.
|
| Alternatively, here's a readable mirror:
| https://ei.cs.vt.edu/%7Ehistory/Daemon.html
|
| And another:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/7w7914/the_origin_of...
| Dalewyn wrote:
| This was the internet we loved, I miss it.
| latexr wrote:
| > Safari Reader View doesn't work on this page.
|
| What do you mean? I just tried it and it was fine.
| pzmarzly wrote:
| For me (macOS 15.0.1), it only extracts the biggest quote
| (Your explanation of the origin of the word daemon ... United
| Kingdom web sites), the rest of the text is lost.
| dcow wrote:
| Works on iOS. Page is so horrendous that I immediately
| reached for it.
| Teknomancer wrote:
| "Text of the site below because looking at that site hurt. A
| lot." For fucking real!
| keepamovin wrote:
| I always wondered about this. Now I know. Thank you :)
| JD557 wrote:
| Unrelated to the word "daemon", but related to the article, I was
| a bit surprised by this assertion:
|
| > Eventually, though, the theory of quantum mechanics showed why
| it wouldn't work.
|
| I was familiar with the information theory arguments (the same
| presented in Wikipedia[1]). Is that why they mean here by
| "quantum mechanics" or is there another counterargument to
| Maxwell's daemon?
|
| 1:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_demon#Criticism_an...
| n4r9 wrote:
| I'm guessing that the daemon's ability to allow only fast
| molecules through the gate depends on knowing their position
| and velocity simultaneously?
| eru wrote:
| But the daemon doesn't need to know them all that precisely.
| n4r9 wrote:
| I think you'd have to be pretty precise to know if it's
| heading towards a hole that's only just large enough for
| it.
| roywiggins wrote:
| It seems to come from measuring the particles at all. One
| result is that the demon has to store information about the
| particles, and erasing that information to free up memory
| increases the entropy of the gas/demon system.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon#Criticism_.
| ..
| Vecr wrote:
| It _probably_ (if the calculations are right) is unable to
| actually do much of anything useful (because it 's too complex
| to avoid being extremely correlated with the rest of the
| universe ("embedded")), and even if it could it wouldn't be
| better than a standard ASI in most real-world situations.
|
| That's assuming you aren't trying to claw back more energy than
| you lose, I'm pretty sure that's not possible to reliably do
| without crazy hypothetical physics.
| pyinstallwoes wrote:
| from PIE _dai-mon- "divider, provider" (of fortunes or
| destinies), from root _da- "to divide."
|
| to divide power, compute.
| mrngm wrote:
| Earlier threads:
|
| - [2023] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35283067 (24
| comments)
|
| - [2022] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31069163 (127
| comments)
|
| - [2018] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16299583 (46
| comments)
|
| - [2011] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2691752 (45
| comments)
| etcd wrote:
| Always thought it was because it denotes a process that stays
| alive and so is like a little living demon in your computer.
| reaperducer wrote:
| I knew the origin of daemon from high school Greek philosophy
| courses.
|
| At the time, I thought "when an I ever going to use this stuff in
| real life?" Then I got into computers.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| I know, right? I used to read about the role of eunuchs in
| ancient royal courts, and I thought to myself, who _does_ that
| anymore?
| pantulis wrote:
| Of course it's not the origin of the usage, but I always found
| Lovecraft's quote from Lactantius to be pretty adequate:
|
| "Demons have the ability to cause people to see things that do
| not exist as if they did exist. -- Lactantius"
| compressedgas wrote:
| http://blogicaster.blogspot.com/2011/10/lovecrafts-lactantiu...
| modernerd wrote:
| Wonderfully written. "Warning: This paragraph is about science
| so, if this topic causes you undue alarm, please close your eyes
| until you've finished reading it."
| gcanyon wrote:
| Ha -- I read the title and said to myself, "gotta be Maxwell,
| right?" The jolt of pleasure I get from being right about things
| like this is unreasonable.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, author tries to throw us a curve ball at first with that
| koo-koo _backronym_.
| dcminter wrote:
| > We also assume that this is the meaning behind the
| daemon.co.uk, host to many United Kingdom web sites
|
| Not sure if it was the origin of the company name, but the domain
| was demon.co.uk not daemon. E.g. I had pretence.demon.co.uk with
| them for a few years.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_Internet
| pixelesque wrote:
| Yeah, never heard of a 'daemon.co.uk' in the 90s, but likewise
| had a Demon account...
| trash_cat wrote:
| "Disk And Executive MONitor" does sound kinda cool, though.
| rubyfan wrote:
| I'd guess someone backed into that acronym when asked "why do
| you call these things daemons?"
| m463 wrote:
| Does Anyone Else Make Outrageous Names?
| jasoneckert wrote:
| The *nix world is full of dark-but-fun terminology. Daemons run
| the system. New files get 666 (before the umask takes away
| unnecessary permissions). Parents kill their children before
| killing themselves. And sometimes you have to kill zombies.
| vhodges wrote:
| From: https://devrant.com/rants/1101391/my-daily-unix-command-
| list...
|
| unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount;
| sleep.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| yum
| oefrha wrote:
| Except you shouldn't fsck while mounted.
| toast0 wrote:
| Works fine in FreeBSD/ufs :p
| Uehreka wrote:
| > unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes;
| unmount; sleep.
|
| T E C H N O L O G I C
|
| ...
|
| T E C H N O L O G I C
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| This is a weird thread to happen upon when my other monitor
| has variables named sexp.
| prepend wrote:
| Tail/head
|
| It's almost like these commands were all made by nerd teenage
| boys.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| Almost feels like a right of passage when you inevitably google
| something like "kill self" (in reference to killing the current
| process) and get a popup telling you about suicide resources.
| ganjatech wrote:
| Or indeed a rite of passage
| mort96 wrote:
| Or "kill orphaned children" and be put a list somewhere
| jakjak123 wrote:
| "Kill orphaned child process"
| gberger wrote:
| Sometimes you have to kill orphans too!
| paulnpace wrote:
| Unics (from Multics).
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Zombies or orphans, depending on which side you want to play as
| today. Plenty of killing to be done on both.
| js2 wrote:
| Zombies can't be killed for they are already dead; they can
| only be reaped, by waiting on them. (This is why init inherits
| orphans, so it may reap them when they eventually die.)
| burcs wrote:
| Saw this on a conspiracy theory subreddit recently, thought it
| was absolutely hilarious:
|
| "Boy I love trapping demons in microscopic silicon megastructures
| to do my bidding, I sure hope nothing goes wrong"
| sgarland wrote:
| I told my eight year old the "we taught sand how to think"
| joke, and he loved it, and also indulged me in a brief
| explanation.
|
| It really is absolutely wild that it all works when you go to
| the absolute fundamentals and start working forward.
| somat wrote:
| The funny thing is that before that we taught light bulbs how
| to think(thermionic logic), and before that we taught magnets
| how to think(relay logic) and before that we taught levers
| how to think(gear logic)
| sgarland wrote:
| It's magic all the way down.
| stuckinhell wrote:
| Didn't some Wharton professor post something similar too
| recently?
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| Huh, I assumed: it does work whilst remaining unseen
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Do you pronounce it as demon or like Matt Damon?
| dcow wrote:
| I believe it officially is pronounced the same as demon. But
| colloquially I hear a lot of (and sometimes find myself using)
| "damon".
| whartung wrote:
| I'm in the Matt Damon camp. Always pronounced it that way,
| never really gave it much thought. Just seems "right" to me.
| JadeNB wrote:
| And now we can perhaps hash out whether the `lib` in
| `/usr/lib` is pronounced with a long or short 'i'. I hope
| I'm not the only one who pronounced it the first way with
| no real thought, and never noticed until I heard someone
| else say it with a long 'i' that that was obviously the
| logical pronunciation.
| dpassens wrote:
| Surely the logical pronunciation is the way you'd
| pronounce it in library, so a long 'ai' rather than any
| kind of 'i'? Though I personally always use the short
| 'i'. I was going to justify that by saying it's the same
| as /usr/bin, but that's also short for binaries, so
| should also be an 'ai'.
| macintux wrote:
| I've been pronouncing it with the short 'i' for 30 years,
| but mainly, possibly only, in my head.
|
| In 1998 I started a new job, and my boss pronounced "URL"
| as "earl". That threw me for a loop, had to fight my way
| through our first conversation before I figured out what
| he was saying.
| bitwize wrote:
| I pronounce API as "appy", which sometimes draws
| quizzical looks (people think I'm using next-level cutesy
| slang for "application"). But I never could do the "earl"
| thing. Or "sequel".
| JadeNB wrote:
| > Surely the logical pronunciation is the way you'd
| pronounce it in library, so a long 'ai' rather than any
| kind of 'i'?
|
| Yep, that's what I meant to say with:
|
| > ... never noticed until I heard someone else say it
| with a long 'i' that that was obviously the logical
| pronunciation.
|
| But maybe the sentence structure was too tortured for it
| to be clear what I was saying.
|
| > Though I personally always use the short 'i'. I was
| going to justify that by saying it's the same as
| /usr/bin, but that's also short for binaries, so should
| also be an 'ai'.
|
| Oh, shoot, even after I noticed the logical pronunciation
| of "lib" (long 'i') it never occurred to me that the same
| applied to "bin". I guess I just can't say any paths out
| loud any more.
| fwip wrote:
| Perhaps the difference for you is that "bin" is already
| an English word with an official pronunciation.
|
| Personally, I also use short-i for "lib," because I tend
| to pronounce shortenings of text as if they were words
| themselves.
| saltcured wrote:
| Do you pronounce the vowel in /var as in "bar" or as in
| "bare"?
|
| Also, for those who try to pronounce everything rather
| than spell them out, where does it end?
|
| I now have a newly discovered, morbid interest in how
| such folks say path elements like "selinux", "httpd", and
| "pgsql"...
| dpassens wrote:
| > that's what I meant to say
|
| Ah, that makes sense. I thought you meant long 'i' as in
| extending the duration of the 'i' sound, like in 'beep'
| vs 'bip'.
| brianmurphy wrote:
| I have always pronounced lib like the word liberal.
|
| I was mind-blown the first time I heard someone pronounce
| etc as "et-see".
|
| et-see rolls off the tongue so much better than ee-tee-
| see that it makes perfect sense now.
| bbor wrote:
| Hard agree. It's an archaic word, it seems a shame not to
| revel in that fact whenever you use it! I've been using
| "automata" a lot recently, and that's another one that is
| just more fun the unusual way. Also it helps that it's
| clear either way -- no one will be confused upon hearing
| "daymon" even if they're not used to it, unlike "etsee",
| "user-slash-libe", "user-slash-bine". Or, god forbid, "oo-
| zir slash"...
| jamesog wrote:
| It should more properly be written as daemon. The ae ("ash")
| character is usually pronounced more like "ee", as in
| encyclopaedia. I've never heard anyone say "encycloPAYdia" :-)
| lagniappe wrote:
| because it's spelled encyclopedia
| jamesog wrote:
| US English spells it as encyclopedia, British English
| spells it as encyclopaedia.
| bbor wrote:
| Fascinating! This is why I stick with nice, clean structural
| linguistics, this applied stuff gets sticky. I just confirmed
| on Youtube that the (some?) British people do indeed
| pronounce "Aesthetic" as "ah-stet-ic" not "ee-stet-ic", and
| upon diving a bit, it seems that the rule is "don't ask for a
| rule, you fool! It's 'e' now except for when it isn't."
| Thanks for the interesting tidbit! The letter
| ae was used in Old English to represent the vowel that's
| pronounced in Modern English ash, fan, happy, and last: /ae/.
| Mostly we now spell that vowel with the letter a, because of
| the Great Vowel Shift. When ae appears in writing
| Modern English, it's meant to be a typographic variant of ae,
| and is pronounced the same as that sequence of vowel letters
| would be. So Encyclopaedia or Encyclopaedia, no difference.
|
| https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70927/how-
| is-%C3...
|
| Highly recommend the protracted arguments in the comments,
| that's a wonderfully pedantic StackExchange. Big shoutout to
| someone in 2012 defining "NLP" as an unusual word -- how the
| world has changed! It's only a matter of time before they
| open an AP/IB course in NLP...
| jamesog wrote:
| "Aesthetic" gets even stickier! In the UK I tend to more
| commonly hear it pronounced as "es-thetic".
|
| The Great Vowel Shift indeed makes written English much
| more confusing than it perhaps should be. English is
| already a messy hodge-podge of a language, then our writing
| system started to get standardised (or standardized, if
| you're American!) right as pronunciation started to change,
| leading to the written version of words suddenly no longer
| being anything like the pronunciation.
| saltcured wrote:
| Hmm, I'm a Californian and I pronounce daemon as demon,
| understanding the first vowel as the same vowel as for
| Aesop. Indistinguishable from the vowel in "beam" and
| "niece".
|
| But I pronounce the first vowel in aesthetic differently.
| For me, it's somewhat in between the vowels in "bed" and
| "bad" but closer to the former.
| bbor wrote:
| ...TIL how to pronounce "Aesop"! Thanks for saving me
| eventual embarrassment - now I know why other people
| don't mix up Aesop Rock and ASAP Rocky!
|
| As a fellow Californian, I'd say we have authority anyway
| - I was taught in school that Ohio has the least
| specialized dialect, but that's based on newscasters and
| such. The 21st century is the Californian century!
|
| ...that is, assuming Brussels' English is out of the
| running, I suppose ;)
| int_19h wrote:
| The letter "ae" as used in Old English does indeed
| correspond to /ae/, but we don't use that letter (or even
| digraph) for this purpose anymore. In all the words where
| it is still occasionally used, it corresponds not to Old
| English "ae", but to Latin "ae", which is [ae].
| bityard wrote:
| Yes. Daemon is just the archaic spelling of demon. The ae is
| a vowel sound that didn't survive to modern times. The word
| was NEVER pronounced "damon." To my knowledge.
| int_19h wrote:
| The original pronunciation of ae/ae in words originating from
| Latin or Greek is basically like "I". As usual, English
| molded it into something else in many cases, which is why we
| write "demon" these days. But if you insist of "daemon", then
| it really ought to be pronounced like the original Greek
| daimon.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| I pedantically use day-mon (working/servant spirit) to
| distinguish from dee-mon (evil spirit) but I suspect I'm very
| much in the minority.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimon vs
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon
|
| I've never found any significance to associate the unix term
| with Demons and consider it a mis-association.
| iwaztomack wrote:
| Don't let MAGA hear you... they'll start banning and burning
| linux boxes.
| trelane wrote:
| "Warning: This paragraph is about science so, if this topic
| causes you undue alarm, please close your eyes until you've
| finished reading it."
|
| Amazing.
| bitwize wrote:
| I remember learning about Maxwell's Daemon through the Apple II
| game _Dr. Maxwell 's Molecule Magic_, in which you take the role
| of the daemon. You must toggle the barrier on and off in order to
| trap enough gas molecules at high enough pressure to launch a
| rocket ship. Once you think you have enough, you can then launch
| the rocket to see how well you did. If you were successful, the
| rocket would blast off the screen and an image would show of an
| astronaut on the moon saying "Hi, Mom!" (Speech was provided via
| PWM through the Apple II speaker.)
|
| Eleven-year-old me was easy to entertain. Especially if rockets,
| robots, or science was involved.
| lynguist wrote:
| I find the "a la mode" vs "au jus" discussion right under the
| daemon one very interesting!
|
| I wasn't familiar with both of these expressions but I looked it
| up and "a la mode" is an American culinary expression, meaning
| "served with ice cream". And "au jus" is also an American
| culinary expression, meaning "gravy" or "broth". Now, even though
| they are both derived from a French expression that is a
| prepositional phrase with a (meaning with), it does not matter
| any more when they were borrowed to English.
|
| "A la mode" became a new adverbial expression meaning just that:
| "served with ice cream". You can have pie a la mode = pie served
| with ice cream, but obviously not *pie with a la mode = pie with
| served with ice cream.
|
| And "au jus" became a noun expression meaning "broth" or "gravy".
| And you must say sandwich with au jus = sandwich with gravy and
| can't say *sandwich au jus = sandwich gravy.
|
| What is extremely interesting here is that it bothers the
| prescriptivist who wants language to be a certain way he feels it
| is _supposed_ to be, also the author on that webpage.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I recall reading a mail exchange posted on some usenet group
| about, IIRC, some boss or similar higher-up being shocked to
| discover the UNIX systems they ran were full of demons, and as a
| devout christian wanted the sysadmin to put an end to that
| immediately. The sysadmin was repeatedly trying to explain that a
| daemon was not the same as a demon, without success.
|
| Tried to find the post again, but no dice :(
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