21 Mar
2018
21 Mar
'18
7:32 a.m.
Allow me to add my 2 cents:
Ancient Greece, like all other "primitive" societies that I am aware
of, had beliefs in "spirits" as well as in the CxO level deities (Most
hunter-gatherer and farmer/hunter Stone Age societies didn't get to
the level of CxO dieties, they stuck with spirits behind everything.).
The CxO deities made the policies; very few of them actually carried
those policies out themselves; they relied on a bunch of lesser
spirits to do them. In Classical Greek, daemonoi.
Where the connection with the English word "demon" comes in, is this:
the Christian Church by and large did not believe in the goodness of
most of those alleged daemonoi and labelled them evil, in large part
because in the Christian mythology, there is very little room for
subsidiary spirits; The Christian God is a god without a specific
portfolio: he runs the whole show. Heaps more history there. too much
to cover.
So Maxwell with his Classical education with its heavy emphasis on
Latin and Greek language and culture, would've had a handy metaphor
immediately understandable by all his scientific peers in the Royal
Society, in France, Germany, Russia, the USA, and elsewhere.
And as such, it would be easily extendable to computer science looking
for a handy term to cover system-level background programs handling
details that were between low-level OS procedures and functions and
high-level user programs.
Wesley Parish
PS FWVLIW, JRR Tolkien took one specific subset of these "spirits",
the woodland spirits, "baptised" them so to speak as he was a devout
Catholic, and turned them into one of the axes of his fiction. Some
years later Cordwainer Smith played the same trick with his Daimoni,
except these Daimoni are more like spirits of the stars. So if you're
a fan of both JRR Tolkien and Cordwainer Smith and wonder why they
seem at times so similar, that is part of the reason.
On 3/21/18, Tim Bradshaw <tfb(a)tfeb.org> wrote:
This seems like an unduly complicated theory. Maxwell
had a good
19th-century Scottish gentleman's education (he knew great chunks of
Paradise Lost by heart as a child) and he would have been far more familiar
with classical literature than most scientists are today as a result.
Chances are he knew what daemons were in mythology because he'd read either
the Greek originals or Latin translations at school & university.
Even today the term can be used without the connotations of evil that it
often has: His Dark Materials has daemons which are not in any way evil.
Perhaps significantly it is heavily influenced by Paradise Lost as well:
perhaps the common source is that. I have a copy but I haven't read it,
sadly.
On 20 Mar 2018, at 18:46, Clem Cole
<clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 2:24 PM, Bakul Shah
<bakul(a)bitblocks.com> wrote:
On Tue, 20 Mar 2018 14:04:38 -0400 Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Dan Cross writes:
Right -- that is what I was under the impression from where the term came
for computer use. Although, I was also under the impression that
Maxwell had taken the term from ideas from some his Cambridge colleagues
that were working on human thought and described the ideas of these
daemons running around in your head supporting things like vision, hearing
and your other senses. The later was formalized I believe years later by
Oliver Suthridge (IIRC my Cog Psych of many years ago) - into the
something like the Pandemonium model of cognition.
i.e. I think the term was used first in Cognition, then to Physics and
finally to Computers.
As for Paul's comment about the daemons. Yes, Kirk McKusick who actually
drew the original BSD daemon with purple sneakers, was wearing the
infamous blue tee with said logo out walking on the street, as one someone
else in the party (maybe Sam Leffler) sporting a 10 anniversary USENIX
shirt in San Antonio many years ago, which has the daemons shown top of a
PDP-11 with pipes, the null device, et al. He has quite a tale of the
experience.
Clem
ᐧ
On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 1:56 PM, George Michaelson <ggm(a)algebras.org>
wrote:
I think daemon/demon came from printers demon, which is carved into
> the government printing office in Brisbane. the printers demon is
> the
> one which stuffed up letters in the tray, to make printers tear
> their
> hair out. Did I say tray? I meant case, upper case, the one above,
> with the big letters, and lower case, the case with the little
> letters. oh dear. really? is that why they are cases?
>
While this story (and the others I trimmed for brevity) is (are)
great,
"daemon" is actually from the Greek, I believe: an intermediary
between
humans (users) and the gods (the kernel).
From http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Daemon.html
Fernando J. Corbato: ... Our use of the word daemon (@
Project MAC in 1963) was inspired by the Maxwell's daemon of
physics and thermodynamics. (My background is Physics.)
Maxwell's daemon was an imaginary agent which helped sort
molecules of different speeds and worked tirelessly in the
background. We fancifully began to use the word daemon to
describe background processes which worked tirelessly to
perform system chores.