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Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing
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- pzmarzly 2y agoInterestingly, 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 https://ei.cs.vt.edu/%7Ehistory/Daemon.html And another: https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/7w7914/the_origin_of_the_word_daemon_in_linux_and_unix/dty4leg/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/7w7914/the_origin_of...
- Dalewyn 2y agoThis was the internet we loved, I miss it.
- latexr 2y ago> Safari Reader View doesn't work on this page. What do you mean? I just tried it and it was fine.
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- Teknomancer 2y ago“Text of the site below because looking at that site hurt. A lot.” For fucking real!
- keepamovin 2y agoI always wondered about this. Now I know. Thank you :)
- JD557 2y agoUnrelated 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_and_development https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_demon#Criticism_an...
- n4r9 2y agoI'm guessing that the daemon's ability to allow only fast molecules through the gate depends on knowing their position and velocity simultaneously?
- eru 2y agoBut the daemon doesn't need to know them all that precisely.
- n4r9 2y agoI 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.
- eru 2y agoWhy would you make the hole so small? The main requirement for the hole is that it's small enough that (with high enough probability) only at most one or a handful of molecules will make its way through. And that size is completely independent of the size of your molecules, and only depends on how many there are per unit volume. There's a lot of 'empty space' between molecules in a gas.
- n4r9 2y agoGood question. I was going off the linked article which states: > In the middle of the divider was a tiny gate, just large enough to admit one molecule of gas. Still, that's quite a small hole relatively speaking. So you'd have to be fairly precise about both position and velocity. Potentially more than is allowed by Plank's constant. I dunno though, this isn't one of the counterarguments in the Wikipedia page, so probably you're right.
- pyinstallwoes 2y agofrom PIE dai-mon- "divider, provider" (of fortunes or destinies), from root da- "to divide." to divide power, compute.
- mrngm 2y agoEarlier threads: - [2023] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35283067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35283067 (24 comments) - [2022] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31069163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31069163 (127 comments) - [2018] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16299583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16299583 (46 comments) - [2011] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2691752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2691752 (45 comments)
- etcd 2y agoAlways thought it was because it denotes a process that stays alive and so is like a little living demon in your computer.
- reaperducer 2y agoI 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 2y agoI 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 2y agoOf 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 2y agohttp://blogicaster.blogspot.com/2011/10/lovecrafts-lactantius.html http://blogicaster.blogspot.com/2011/10/lovecrafts-lactantiu...
- modernerd 2y agoWonderfully 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 2y agoHa -- 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 2y agoYeah, author tries to throw us a curve ball at first with that koo-koo backronym.
- dcminter 2y ago> 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_Internet
- pixelesque 2y agoYeah, never heard of a 'daemon.co.uk' in the 90s, but likewise had a Demon account...
- trash_cat 2y ago"Disk And Executive MONitor" does sound kinda cool, though.
- jasoneckert 2y agoThe *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 2y agoFrom: https://devrant.com/rants/1101391/my-daily-unix-command-list-unzip-strip-touch-finger-mount-fsck-more-yes-unmount https://devrant.com/rants/1101391/my-daily-unix-command-list... unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep.
- JKCalhoun 2y agoyum
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- oefrha 2y agoExcept you shouldn’t fsck while mounted.
- toast0 2y agoWorks fine in FreeBSD/ufs :p
- Uehreka 2y ago> 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
- burcs 2y agoSaw 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 2y agoI 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.
- stuckinhell 2y agoDidn't some Wharton professor post something similar too recently?
- FergusArgyll 2y agoHuh, I assumed: it does work whilst remaining unseen
- twobitshifter 2y agoDo you pronounce it as demon or like Matt Damon?
- dcow 2y agoI believe it officially is pronounced the same as demon. But colloquially I hear a lot of (and sometimes find myself using) “damon”.
- whartung 2y agoI’m in the Matt Damon camp. Always pronounced it that way, never really gave it much thought. Just seems “right” to me.
- JadeNB 2y agoAnd 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 2y agoSurely 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 2y agoI'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.
- trelane 2y ago"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.
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- bitwize 2y agoI 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 2y agoI 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 à (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.
- amatecha 2y agoYeah, I was hanging out with someone recently who kept using "au jus" like "sauce", i.e. "you could make that with an au jus" , "ooh yeah that would be so good with an au jus on the side!" or similar ...
- BlueTemplar 2y agoI immediately ordered my daemon to cook me some pilipili au jus de cuniculus. Also, I think I will risk opening my eyes now.
- selimthegrim 2y agoYou can say sandwich au jus but it refers to the sandwich with gravy not the gravy
- magicalhippo 2y agoI 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 :(
- tharkun__ 2y agoA real BOFH would've just complied with the boss' request and made sure all the daemons were killed and stayed dead.
- emmelaich 2y agoMaybe we should have used `eudaemon` (happy spirit) to avoid alarming the common folk.
- mmooss 2y agoThey rely too much on Professor Corbato's account: Corbato confidently gives the reason but A) doesn't claim to have coined the term, and may not know what the coiner's thinking was; B) at the time may have had a different understanding than some other members of the group - it's not the sort of thing that people have a meeting about; and C) is writing about something that happened decades ago. Corbato then cites Take Our Word's prior description - people who weren't present when the word was coined, and who openly say they have no idea: "This is so reminiscent of Maxwell's daemon watching his molecules that we can only assume that whoever dubbed these "system processes" had Maxwell's daemon in mind. Unfortunately, we have found no hard evidence to support this." Then Take Our Word cites Corbato, creating a loop. The only evidence in that loop is Corbato's flawed (being human), prompted (by reading Take Our Word) memory of possibly limited knowledge from decades ago.
- mmooss 2y agoThey do have more evidence, which I overlooked (apologies to the OP): "Professor Jerome H. Saltzer, who also worked on Project MAC, confirms the Maxwell's demon explanation. He is currently working on pinpointing the origin of the erroneous acronym etymology for daemon in this sense."