created, $=dv.current().file.ctime & modified, =this.modified
tags: Computers
rel: The Man Who Changed Everything - Life of James Clerk Maxwell
rel: Survey of Computer Expert As Wizard Archetype
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.
Initially purported, first daemon (an abbreviation for Disk and Executive MONitor) was a program that automatically made tape backups of the file system.
Being an imaginary agent which helped sort molecules at different speeds and worked tireless in the background.
Or use of the word daemon was inspired by Maxwell’s daemon of physics and thermodynamics.
Demon and Daemon were used interchangeably. One from medieval Latin and the other from classical Latin. Socrates used it as “attendant, ministering or indwelling spirit; genius.” It was a short period that daemon began to mean “an evil spirit.” influenced by biblical usage.
The 19th century scientist James Maxwell once daydreamed (the polite term is “thought experiment”) about a problem in physics. He imagined a closed container which was divided in half. In the middle of the divider was a tiny gate, just large enough to admit one molecule of gas. This gate, in Maxwell’s imagination, was operated by a tiny daemon. This daemon observed the speed (i.e. temperature) of the molecules heading for the gate and, depending on the speed, let them through. If he let only slow molecules pass from side A to side B and only fast molecules pass from side B to side A, then A would get hot while B cooled. Maxwell’s daemon was only imaginary, of course, but as it seemed to evade the laws of thermodynamics it caused quite a stir. Eventually, though, the theory of quantum mechanics showed why it wouldn’t work.
Since a daemon as a system process monitors tasks and performs actions based on their behaviors, we can only assume that whoever dubbed it had Maxwell in mind.
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.
Daemon and Demon
Digging deeper into this aspect, there’s a question about pronunciation. People will use day-mun in place of the more evil demon, especially when discussing computing. Both have the same origin but are no longer the same word. The spellings have acquired different connotations so they’re not exactly the same anymore, so it makes sense to alter pronunciation.