I seem to remember an article in the WellHouse newsletter "Of Course" regarding daemon's, and how the name came about.

I've lost my copy and was asked about this recently, any chance of posting at some point?

john

Well now, the Greek Gods hated doing the washing up and the ironing, so they employed mortals for the task;  alas, the morals got discontented, went on strike, were always going off sick, and from time to time had to be replaced when they passed on.   So the gods had a brilliant idea; they did a deal with some mortals who were around at the time, offering them eternal life if they would do the tasks to which they were assigned for ever, without complaint except in the most extreme of crises.   And these ex-mortal were to be free to idle away all the free time they had when their assigned duties were completed.   The name given to these imoortal non-deity were the "daemons", and that's where the name in Unix came from.

It's a good story, and an apt name for helper tasks that are started when a system is booted, and remain running in the background taking care of the jobs the user (a.k.a. the god in this context) doesn't want to bother with, such as serving out web pages or controlling the print queues.  I confess that I was a little worried when I first heard the story and started retelling it, for fear that - whilst a good story - it was untrue.  I need not have worried; one day I was doing the training course and about to tell the story when I asked "is anyone here an expert on Greek mythology" scarecly expecting the answer I got ... "Yes, I was reading about this on the train coming here"; the gentleman concerned confirmed that my story is correct in essence, and passed me his book so that I could read it for myself.

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