>While we have Mike on the subject <G>.
>
>My dog-earred UNIX manual says that Daemon is an acronym for Disk,
>Access, and Extension Monitor.
>
>Myth or not?
proably true.. OTOH, the FTP archive searching utility is known as
"Archie", and (purely by coincidence) the gopher equivalents are:
Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives
(Veronica)
and:
Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display
(Jughead)
other questionable entries include:
the filesystem checking utility
(fsck)
the Computer Oracle and Password System
(COPS)
the Security Administrator's Tool for Analyzing Networks or:
(SATAN)
the Security Administrator's Network Testing Analyzer
(SANTA.. for the squeamish)
Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle
(which is disputed by the guys who founded Yahoo! themselves)
and:
Practical Extraction Reporting Language or:
Pathalogically Eclectic Rubbish Lister
(both officially sanctioned by Larry Wall)
hacker etymology is a very tricky field, because language is a hacker's
favorite toy. contractions are an especially difficult field, because
there's no way to distinguish an acronym (the concatenation of the first
letters of a commonly-used phrase) from a retronym (an arguably plausible
expansion of a cool character series, like VIPER) after the fact. there's
a certain Humpty-Dumptyism among hackers when it comes to language:
"when I use a word, it means exactly what I want it to, neither
more nor less!"
mike stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 'net geek..
been there, done that, have network, will travel.
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