comments:
According to ye olde Jargon File [1], a daemon is "A program which is not invoked explicitly, but which lays dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur. The idea is that the perpetrator of the condition need not be aware that a daemon is lurking (though often a program will commit an action only because it knows that it will implicitly invoke a daemon)...Daemons are usually spawned automatically by the system, and may either live forever or be regenerated at intervals...DAEMON was introduced to computing by CTSS [2] people (who pronounced it dee'mon)..." Daemon is also the title of a 2006 thriller novel by Daniel Suarez [3]. In the novel, a famous, wealthy tech tycoon dies and leaves a daemon running to execute an unknown plan after his death. The daemon is a computer program that reacts to news headlines and does bad things, like murdering people for reasons only its dead creator would know. It's a pretty interesting book, and the author has a deep technical understanding of computers. The book was something of a sensation among working programmers and tech professionals on its release. This was because the novel's technical aspects were quite detailed, realistic and conceivably feasible with then-current technology; the "technology run amok" narrative hit a lot harder and was a lot more unsettling than ordinary sci-fi fare. [1] https://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-2.1.1.dos.txt [2] The Compatible Time-Sharing System was a multi-user operating system released in 1961. [3] Amazon link