BSD Daemon - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The BSD daemon, nicknamed Beastie, is the generic mascot

Mascot

The term mascot – defined as a term for any person, animal, or object thought to bring luck – colloquially includes anything used to represent a group with a common public identity, such as a school, professional sports team, society, military unit, or brand name...

of BSD operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

Overview

The BSD daemon is named after a software daemon
Daemon (computer software)
In Unix and other multitasking computer operating systems, a daemon is a computer program that runs as a background process, rather than being under the direct control of an interactive user...

, a computer program found on Unix-like

Unix-like

A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification....

operating systems, which through a play on words takes the cartoon shape of a mythical demon

Demon

call - 1347 531 7769 for more infoIn Ancient Near Eastern religions as well as in the Abrahamic traditions, including ancient and medieval Christian demonology, a demon is considered an "unclean spirit" which may cause demonic possession, to be addressed with an act of exorcism...

. The BSD daemon's nickname Beastie is a slurred phonetic pronunciation of BSD. Beastie customarily carries a trident

Trident

A trident , also called a trishul or leister or gig, is a three-pronged spear. It is used for spear fishing and was also a military weapon. Tridents are featured widely in mythical, historical and modern culture. The major Hindu god, Shiva the Destroyer and the sea god Poseidon or Neptune are...

to symbolize a software daemon's forking

Fork (operating system)

In computing, when a process forks, it creates a copy of itself. More generally, a fork in a multithreading environment means that a thread of execution is duplicated, creating a child thread from the parent thread....

of processes

Process (computing)

In computing, a process is an instance of a computer program that is being executed. It contains the program code and its current activity. Depending on the operating system , a process may be made up of multiple threads of execution that execute instructions concurrently.A computer program is a...

. The FreeBSD

FreeBSD

FreeBSD is a free Unix-like operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via BSD UNIX. Although for legal reasons FreeBSD cannot be called “UNIX”, as the direct descendant of BSD UNIX , FreeBSD’s internals and system APIs are UNIX-compliant...

web site has noted Evi Nemeth's 1988 remarks about cultural-historical daemons in the Unix System Administration Handbook: "The ancient Greeks' concept of a 'personal daemon' was similar to the modern concept of a 'guardian angel' ...As a rule, UNIX systems seem to be infested with both daemons and demons."

Copyright

The copyright of the official BSD daemon images is held by Marshall Kirk McKusick

Marshall Kirk McKusick

Marshall Kirk McKusick is a computer scientist, known for his extensive work on BSD, from the 1980s to FreeBSD in the present day. He was president of the USENIX Association from 1990 to 1992 and again from 2002 to 2004, and still serves on the board. He is also on the editorial board of...

(a very early BSD developer who worked with Bill Joy

Bill Joy

William Nelson Joy , commonly known as Bill Joy, is an American computer scientist. Joy co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as chief scientist at the company until 2003...

). He has freely licensed the mascot for individual "personal use within the bounds of good taste (an example of bad taste was a picture of the BSD daemon blowtorching a Solaris logo)." Any use requires both a copyright notice and attribution.

Reproduction of the daemon in quantity, such as on T-shirts and CDROMs requires advance permission from McKusick, who restricts its use to implementations having to do with BSD and not as a company logo (although companies with BSD-based products such as Scotgold and Wind River Systems

Wind River Systems

Wind River Systems, Inc. is a company providing embedded systems, development tools for embedded systems, middleware, and other types of software. The company was founded in Berkeley, California in 1981 by Jerry Fiddler and David Wilner. On June 4, 2009, Wind River announced that Intel had bought...

have gotten this kind of permission).

McKusick has said that during the early 1990s "I almost lost the daemon to a certain large company because I failed to show due diligence in protecting it. So, I've taken due diligence seriously since then."

In a request to use a license such as Creative Commons, McKusick replied:

I prefer that the BSD Daemon be used in the context of BSD software.
That is the reason that I carefully control my copyright of the BSD
Daemon image to ensure that the image is not used inappropriately.
I have agreed to allow the small image to appear on Wikipedia but
not the larger ones. It is also why I am not going to put a creative
commons copyright on it.

History

The BSD daemon was first drawn in 1976 by comic artist Phil Foglio

Phil Foglio

Philip "Phil" Foglio is an American cartoonist and comic book artist best known for his humorous science fiction and fantasy work.-Early life and career:...

. Developer Mike O'Brien, who was working as a bonded locksmith at the time, opened a wall safe in Foglio's Chicago

Chicago

Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

apartment after a roommate had "split town" without leaving the combination. In return Foglio agreed to draw T-shirt artwork for O'Brien, who gave him some Polaroid

Instant film

Instant film is a type of photographic film first introduced by Polaroid that is designed to be used in an instant camera...

snaps of a PDP-11

PDP-11

The PDP-11 was a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation from 1970 into the 1990s, one of a succession of products in the PDP series. The PDP-11 replaced the PDP-8 in many real-time applications, although both product lines lived in parallel for more than 10 years...

system running UNIX

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

along with some notions about visual puns having to do with pipes, demons/daemons, forks, a "bit bucket" named /dev/null
/dev/null
In Unix-like operating systems, /dev/null or the null device is a special file that discards all data written to it and provides no data to any process that reads from it ....

and so on. Foglio's drawing showed four happy little red daemon characters carrying tridents and climbing about on (or falling off of) water pipes in front of a caricature

Caricature

A caricature is a portrait that exaggerates or distorts the essence of a person or thing to create an easily identifiable visual likeness. In literature, a caricature is a description of a person using exaggeration of some characteristics and oversimplification of others.Caricatures can be...

of a PDP-11 and was used for the first national UNIX meeting in the US (which was held in Urbana, Illinois

Urbana, Illinois

Urbana is the county seat of Champaign County, Illinois, United States. As of the 2010 census, the population was 41,250. Urbana is the tenth-most populous city in Illinois outside of the Chicago metropolitan area....

). Bell Labs

Bell Labs

Bell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...

bought dozens of T-shirts featuring this drawing, which subsequently appeared on UNIX

Unix

T-shirts for about a decade. Usenix

USENIX

-External links:* *...

purchased the reproduction rights to Foglio's artwork in 1986. His original drawing was then apparently mislaid and lost shortly after having been sent to Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...

for use in an advertisement and all known copies are from photographs of surviving T-shirts.

The later, more popular versions of the BSD daemon were drawn by animation

Animation

Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. The effect is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in several ways...

director

Film director

A film director is a person who directs the actors and film crew in filmmaking. They control a film's artistic and dramatic nathan roach, while guiding the technical crew and actors.-Responsibilities:...

John Lasseter

John Alan Lasseter is an American animator, director and the chief creative officer at Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. He is also currently the Principal Creative Advisor for Walt Disney Imagineering....

beginning with an early greyscale drawing on the cover of the Unix System Manager's Manual published in 1984 by USENIX

USENIX

-External links:* *...

for 4.2BSD. Its author/editor Sam Leffler (who had been a technical staff member at CSRG) and Lasseter were both employees of Lucasfilm

Lucasfilm

Lucasfilm Limited is an American film production company founded by George Lucas in 1971, based in San Francisco, California. Lucas is the company's current chairman and CEO, and Micheline Chau is the president and COO....

at the time. About four years after this Lasseter drew his widely known take on the BSD daemon for the cover of McKusick's co-authored 1988 book, The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD Operating System. Lasseter drew a somewhat lesser-known running BSD daemon for the 4.4BSD version of the book in 1994.

Use in operating system logos

From 1994 to 2004, the NetBSD

NetBSD

NetBSD is a freely available open source version of the Berkeley Software Distribution Unix operating system. It was the second open source BSD descendant to be formally released, after 386BSD, and continues to be actively developed. The NetBSD project is primarily focused on high quality design,...

project used artwork by Shawn Mueller as a logo, featuring four BSD daemons in a pose similar to the famous photo, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima

Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima

Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima is a historic photograph taken on February 23, 1945, by Joe Rosenthal. It depicts five United States Marines and a U.S. Navy corpsman raising the flag of the United States atop Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II.The photograph was extremely...

. This was superseded by a more abstract flag logo, chosen from over 400 entries in a logo competition.

Early versions of OpenBSD

OpenBSD

OpenBSD is a Unix-like computer operating system descended from Berkeley Software Distribution , a Unix derivative developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It was forked from NetBSD by project leader Theo de Raadt in late 1995...

(2.3 and 2.4) used a BSD daemon with a halo

Halo (religious iconography)

A halo is a ring of light that surrounds a person in art. They have been used in the iconography of many religions to indicate holy or sacred figures, and have at various periods also been used in images of rulers or heroes...

but then switched to Puffy as a mascot.

The FreeBSD

FreeBSD

project used the 1988 Lasseter drawing as both a logo and mascot for 12 years. However, questions arose as to the graphic's effectiveness as a logo. The daemon was not unique to FreeBSD since it was historically used by other BSD variants and members of the FreeBSD core team considered it inappropriate for corporate and marketing purposes. Lithographically, the scanned Lasseter drawing is not line art

Line art

Line art is any image that consists of distinct straight and curved lines placed against a background, without gradations in shade or hue to represent two-dimensional or three-dimensional objects...

and however drawn neither scaled easily in a wide range of sizes nor rendered appealingly in only two or three colours. A contest to create a new FreeBSD logo began in February 2005 and a scalable graphic which somewhat echoes the BSD daemon's head was chosen the following October, although "the little red fellow" has been kept on as an official project mascot.

Deprecated name

In the mid 1990s a marketer for Walnut Creek CDROM

Walnut Creek CDROM

Walnut Creek CDROM was an early provider of freeware, shareware and free software on CD-ROMs. The company was founded in August 1991 by Bob Bruce and was one of the first commercial distributors of free software on CD-ROMs...

called the mascot Chuck, perhaps referring to a brand name for the kind of shoes

Chuck Taylor All-Stars

Chuck Taylor All Stars, or Converse All Stars, also referred to as "Chuck Taylors", "Converses", "All Stars", "Chucks" or "Cons", are canvas and rubber shoes produced by Converse. They were first produced in 1917 as the "All Star," Converse's attempt to capture the basketball shoe market...

worn by the character but this name is strongly deprecated by the copyright holder who has said the BSD daemon "is very proud of the fact that he does not have a name, he is just the BSD daemon. If you insist on a name, call him beastie."

ASCII image

This ASCII art

ASCII art

ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters...

image of the BSD daemon by Felix Lee appeared in the startup menu of FreeBSD

FreeBSD

version 5.x and can still be set as startup image in later versions. It is also used in the daemon_saver screensaver

Screensaver

A screensaver is a type of computer program initially designed to prevent phosphor burn-in on CRT and plasma computer monitors by blanking the screen or filling it with moving images or patterns when the computer is not in use...

.

, ,
/( )`
\ \___ / |
/- _ `-/ '
(/\/ \ \ /\
/ / | ` \
O O ) / |
`-^--'`< '
(_.) _ ) /
`.___/` /
`-----' /
<----. __ / __ \
<----|

O)))) \) /

<----' `--' `.__,' \
| |
\ / /\
______( (_ / \______/
,' ,-----' |
`--{__________)
External links

Photograph of a T-shirt bearing Foglio's original 1976 drawing
Photograph of a BSD-UNIX/VAX manual showing Lasseter's 1984 drawing
Photograph of a book cover bearing Lasseter's iconic 1988 drawing
Photograph of a book cover with Lasseter's 1994 drawing of a running BSD daemon
FreeBSD's The BSD Daemon page
The red guy's name, from the FreeBSD FAQ
What's that daemon? — info on daemon shirts and a funny story
How to make a beastie flag
BSD Daemon Gallery

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.