BSD Daemon

BSD Daemon
The BSD Daemon as drawn by Poul-Henning Kamp
Designed by	Phil Foglio Mike O'Brien John Lasseter
In-universe information
Nickname	Beastie

The BSD Daemon, nicknamed Beastie, is the generic mascot of BSD operating systems. The BSD Daemon is named after software daemons, a class of long-running computer programs in Unix-like operating systems—which, through a play on words, takes the cartoon shape of a demon. The BSD Daemon's nickname Beastie is a slurred phonetic (in American English) pronunciation of BSD. Beastie customarily carries a trident to symbolize a software daemon's forking of processes. The FreeBSD 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."^{[1][full citation needed]}