The first UNIX dæmon

email by Mike O'Brien

To: "Jonathan M. Bresler" 
Cc: obrien@antares.aero.org (Mike O'Brien),
        joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de,
        chat@FreeBSD.org, juphoff@tarsier.cv.nrao.edu
Date: Tue, 07 May 1996 16:27:20 -0700
Sender: owner-chat@FreeBSD.org

> details and gifs PLEASE!

If you insist. :-)

Sherman, set the Wayback Machine for around 1976 or so (see Peter Salus' A Quarter Century of UNIX for details), when the first really national UNIX meeting was held in Urbana, Illinois. This would be after the ``forty people in a Brooklyn classroom'' meeting held by Mel Ferentz (yeah I was at that too) and the more-or-less simultaneous West Coast meeting(s) hosted by SRI, but before the UNIX Users Group was really incorporated as a going concern.

I knew Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie would be there. I was living in Chicago at the time, and so was comic artist Phil Foglio, whose star was just beginning to rise. At that time I was a bonded locksmith. Phil's roommate had unexpectedly split town, and he was the only one who knew the combination to the wall safe in their apartment. This is the only apartment I've ever seen that had a wall safe, but it sure did have one, and Phil had some stuff locked in there. I didn't hold out much hope, since safes are far beyond where I was (and am) in my locksmithing sphere of competence, but I figured ``no guts no glory'' and told him I'd give it a whack. In return, I told him, he could do some T-shirt art for me. He readily agreed.

Wonder of wonders, this safe was vulnerable to the same algorithm that Master locks used to be susceptible to. I opened it in about 15 minutes of manipulation. It was my greatest moment as a locksmith and Phil was overjoyed. I went down to my lab and shot some Polaroid snaps of the PDP-11 system I was running UNIX on at the time, and gave it to Phil with some descriptions of the visual puns I wanted: pipes, demons with forks running along the pipes, a ``bit bucket'' named /dev/null, all that.

What Phil came up with is the artwork that graced the first decade's worth of ``UNIX T-shirts'', which were made by a Ma and Pa operation in a Chicago suburb. They turned out transfer art using a 3M color copier in their basement. Hence, the PDP-11 is reversed (the tape drives are backwards) but since Phil left off the front panel, this was hard to tell. His trademark signature was photo-reversed, but was recopied by the T-shirt people and ``re-forwardized'', which is why it looks a little funny compared to his real signature.

Dozens and dozens of these shirts were produced. Bell Labs alone accounted for an order of something like 200 for a big picnic. However, only four (4) REAL originals were produced: these have a distinctive red collar and sleeve cuff. One went to Ken, one to Dennis, one to me, and one to my then-wife. I now possess the latter two shirts. Ken and Dennis were presented with their shirts at the Urbana conference.

People ordered these shirts direct from the Chicago couple. Many years later, when I was living in LA, I got a call from Armando Stettner, then at DEC, asking about that now-famous artwork. I told him I hadn't talked to the Illinois T-shirt makers in years. At his request I called them up. They'd folded the operation years ago and were within days of discarding all the old artwork. I requested its return, and duly received it back in the mail. It looked strange, seeing it again in its original form, a mirror image of the shirts with which I and everyone else were now familiar.

I sent the artwork to Armando, who wanted to give it to the Ultrix marketing people. They came out with the Ultrix poster that showed a nice shiny Ultrix machine contrasted with the chewing-gum-and-string PDP-11 UNIX people were familiar with. They still have the artwork, so far as I know.

I no longer recall the exact contents of the letter I sent along with the artwork. I did say that as far as I knew, Phil had no residual rights to the art, since it was a `work made for hire', though nothing was in writing (and note this was decades before the new copyright law). I do not now recall if I explicitly assigned all rights to DEC. What is certain is that John Lassiter's dæmon, whether knowingly borrowed from the original, or created by parallel evolution, postdates the first horde of UNIX dæmons by at least a decade and probably more. And if Lassiter's dæmon looks a lot like a Phil Foglio creation, there's a reason.

I have never scanned in Phil's artwork; I've hardly ever scanned in anything, so I have no GIFs to show. But I have some very very old UNIX T-shirts in startlingly good condition. Better condition than I am at any rate: I no longer fit into either of them.