John Lasseter drew the BSD daemon logo | Hacker News Reader

John Lasseter drew the BSD daemon logo

jacobelder.com

440 pointsjelder96 comments

Some additional context: the editor of the manual was Sam Leffler, who was a coworker of Lasseter at Lucasfilm at the time.

> The later, more popular versions of the BSD Daemon were drawn by animation director John Lasseter beginning with an early greyscale drawing on the cover of the Unix System Manager's Manual published in 1984 by USENIX for 4.2BSD.[7] Its author/editor Sam Leffler (who had been a technical staff member at CSRG) and Lasseter were both employees of Lucasfilm 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.[8] Lasseter drew a somewhat lesser-known running BSD Daemon for the 4.4BSD version of the book in 1994.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_Daemon

Is there a connection between Sam Leffler the BSD contributor at Lucasfilm/Pixar and BSD as the basis for NeXTSTEP/OS X at NeXT/Apple?

As far as I can tell, there is no direct connection. Sam Leffler contributed most to the 4.1BSD and 4.2BSD while at Berkeley [1], while NeXTSTEP was based on Mach which was based on 4.2BSD and developed by Richard Rashid and Avie Tevanian at Carnegie Mellon [2].

Perhaps the indirect connection is that, before Linux, BSD was the natural choice for an open-source UNIX derivative, and Steve Jobs had an instinct for seeking out the leading edges of computing at the time.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_J._Leffler

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel)#Development

I'd say before the UNIX lawsuit[1] of April 1992, BSD was the natural choice for a UNIX derivative . This lawsuit delayed the release of 4.4BSD, and since Linux was from scratch, it had no cloud of legal uncertainty.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories%2C_In....

Imagine what the world would look like if BSD became the dominant OS instead of Linux.

Well, we’d be rebuilding it a lot.

Well, Steve Jobs did buy Pixar from Lucas.

Do you know where to find the lesser known running version mentioned in this excerpt?

> The BSD Daemon was first drawn in 1976 by comic artist Phil Foglio. Developer Mike O'Brien, who was working as a bonded locksmith at the time, opened a wall safe in Foglio's Chicago 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 snaps of a PDP-11 system running UNIX along with some notions about visual puns having to do with pipes, demons/daemons, forks, a "bit bucket" named /dev/null, etc.[3] 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 of a PDP-11 and was used for the first national UNIX meeting in the US (which was held in Urbana, Illinois).

Wow, Phil Foglio as well? The origin story gets even more interesting. Here is a page that features the original artwork: http://www.mckusick.com/beastie/shirts/usenix.html

Slightly different but OpenBSD does a good job of finding artists, for example the artwork for 6.5 and 6.6 was drawn by Natasha Allegri of Adventure Time and Bee and PuppyCat

https://www.openbsd.org/66.html

They also designed probably the best t-shirt art for an OS release, no longer available, sadly.

https://www.openbsd.org/tshirts.html#47

https://twitter.com/natazilla/status/1187896621045956608

Oh man I was just thinking that would make an awesome t-shirt, wish it was still available.

If you're willing to play in the darker shades or gray, there are plenty of websites that will print up posters/t-shirts/etc of any image you upload to them. Even as one offs. JIT of swag is a real thing now

Man that's some pretty badass BSD artwork too.

"Puffy vs Cthulhu" is also pretty badass.

https://www.openbsd.org/images/puffy_vs_cthulhu.jpg

https://twitter.com/natazilla/status/1138473365969264643

Damn that’s legit. Anyone know if I can just tip the artist and print it myself?

Shoutout to Bee and Puppycat as well, of which the entire first season is freely available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2DcNkn8HAwQLcXTiDB87...

Note that this is very different than the first season on Netflix fwiw. Both are great though!

I keep hearing more and more about OpenBSD. Lots of people including John Carmack, browse the source code and have nothing but good things to say about it. It's made me very curious to look at it myself

I run OpenBSD on my laptop. I love it, but I would recommend that beginners read some warnings on the label.

First, you will not have bluetooth. Second, it is slow in ways that will matter. As in, you will feel it, but not be annoyed by it (Especially with a web browser). Third, KDE plasma support is a work in progress (read: most people do not get KDE plasma on an OpenBSD installation today, although it won't stay like this forever).

With these disclaimers out of the way, I can heartily encourage it. I love having an operating system that I can trust. Things work, things are well doccumented and things are very very clean.

I’ve played around with FreeBSD before and have a WiFi dongle from when I put it on an RPI. I have an old X220 for these type of experiments, but I appreciate the warning

OpenBSD runs fine on my X220i, and its Intel WiFi (iwn) is supported. But, the firmware has to be downloaded separately, so you either have to copy the firmware onto a USB drive and run fw_update after installation, or plug in Ethernet before installing, and it'll download the firmware automatically after the first boot.

That's a fair assessment. One more thing I would add is that things you can frequently get working on FreeBSD (like JetBrains IDEs) might be significantly more challenging (or impossible) on an OpenBSD desktop.

I'm a long-time fan of OpenBSD (I started using it in 1999) and I strongly second reading the warnings on the label.

I was surprised how well it works in a lot of ways on my laptop (Thinkpad E585 with an aftermarket Intel wireless card). I will agree with the slowness, and I have managed to make it freeze once or twice, and fail to suspend properly quite a few times.

But in terms of "the Wi-fi actually worked without pulling teeth" it was streets ahead of both FreeBSD and Debian.

why is the latest release seemingly the only one without a release "song"?

And Debian releases are named for Toy Story characters.

The only release I knew by name was Woody, but for others curious, here's a page with the releases names listed:

https://www.debian.org/releases/

I love the homages/easter eggs in the *nix world

Wheezy stuck in my mind. Good to finally know how it came to be! Funny that Wheezy is a penguin!

Yeah, Wheezy does sound familiar as well. I ran a Woody server in a co-lo for a personal side hustle, so I was familiar with it. After that, work took me into the RHEL realm with lots of CentOS with much less interesting names like 5, 6, 7.

Bruce Perens, a major figure in Debian Linux, worked at Pixar for years. He was my officemate for a while when I was there in the late 90s.

I had the opportunity to visit Pixars office at Emeryville 20 years ago. Loved the garden shed offices!

The espresso milkshakes at Rudy's Can't Fail Cafe--well, the food is fine, but the shakes are glorious.

And Debian itself is a combination of Deb and Ian, Deb being Ian's partner at the time.

Deb broke up with Ian and then Ian had a tragic end. It is a name surrounded by tragedy.

Jeez, I never could draw the connection between those Debian names and Toy Story characters. Till now. Thank you. TIL!

Now we're getting more tangential, but for years, Ansible releases were named for Van Halen songs (see old Changelog here: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v1.8.4/CHANGELOG.md)

And R releases are named after (often obscure) quotes from the comic strip Peanuts (current release "Eggshell Igloo")

Sid, the unstable build, is named for the child antagonist in Toy Story.

Not really related but the artist behind the Go(lang) mascot is Renee French [0] who also did Grit Bath [1]. She happens to be married to Rob Pike, so I assume that had something to do with it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9e_French

[1] https://www.abebooks.com/comics/GRIT-BATH-Nos-1-3-French-Ren...

She also created Glenda the Plan 9 Bunny: https://9p.io/plan9/glenda.html

I always thought that gopher had a weird creepy vibe, so I guess I’m not surprised at the artist’s other work.

"Lassetter wasn’t the first to draw this, but his version became the most popular." (FTA)

Phil Foglio (Girl Genius, Buck GoDot, etc) had drawn the first version prior to Lasseter's

And some great card art from the "let's not take this too seriously" era of Magic the Gathering.

Wow, really? That's amazing. I wonder if Foglio was ever actually a BSD user.

I have a soft spot in my heart for Foglio's early work, like "What's New with Phil & Dixie" from Dragon magazine and his adaptation of Myth Adventures. I'm particularly fond of The Winslow[1]. Sadly, nobody I know has ever read more than a few Phil & Dixie cartoons and I just get weird looks if I talk about The Winslow.

[1] https://comicvine.gamespot.com/winslow/4005-31428/

Foglio's drawing was for UNIX, a couple years before the first BSD releases. Unfortunately the original was lost, and the best you can find online now are just photos of t-shirts like https://www.mckusick.com/beastie/jpg/foglio.jpg

Greg Lehey records some relevant history of the daemon logo prior to Lasseter's cover (along with a classic daemon t-shirt story) at http://www.lemis.com/grog/whyadaemon.html.

Anyone else think about the connection between OSX, Jobs, Pixar, etc....seems like the elite of the tech revolution all were neighbours as usual with industry control

So much control that you could get industry quality level OSes for free or by the cost of the CD's:

-FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, GNU/Linux with slackware CD's...

This is like getting avionics industry manuals and hardware for free and with a press of a button you could get a self-assembled UFO with an antigravity field by half the price of a car.

There was a center of excellence and a lot of innovation by a relatively small industry at the time.

Here's the book with the John Lassetter cover if anyone wants it: https://www.amazon.com/Design-Implementation-UNIX-Operating-...

There's a "Used - Good" quality one for $4.

OP here. If any historians would like to see details from any other parts of this set, just ask.

A few weeks ago I saw a food truck using the old Lasseter FreeBSD beastie logo in southern California. Here's their Instagram with the logo prominently displayed in multiple places.

https://www.instagram.com/aguasfrescaslupita

The truck I saw has him maybe 4 feet tall on the left hand side: https://9ol.es/tmp/PXL_20240110_021538249.jpg

We should invite them to like, a linux conference or something. They'd be very popular.

Well, good thing it's BSD licensed! Open Source for the yummy win!

There are plenty of things that I like to think I could probably turn my hand to and make a passable job of if I had to, but Illustration is not one of them. I would love to have to ability to visualise something and make it appear on paper like that, but no matter how hard I try I never will. The character and expression put into something that was probably a 30 minute sketch is quite amazing!

I love these materialized manuals. Do we still have them for the modern enterprise *nix operating systems such as Redhat and such?

wow that is actually pretty cool, i wonder what other instances of thought leaders criss crossed to a different industry like that

A favorite instance of mine is Rolly Crump, who did a lot of design work for Disney theme parks but also created the iconic branding for Ernie Ball guitar strings.

Rolly! My dad worked with him at AVG where Rolly would consult in his post disney career, he art directed the LazerMaze that was a mall attraction IR gun robot shooting gallery you would walk through installed a bunch of places, Edmonton Mall, Sherman Oaks Galleria, Six Flags Magic Mountain, san diego boardwalk and a bunch of places. . https://bestedmontonmall.com/2021/01/25/lazer-maze/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU3g6wvk5jQ I think we may have the only parts of the thing left. It used an s100 bus computer with a custom designed audio adpcm board. Rolly designed the robots and the never built robot queen, before he passed I asked if he had any art left but sadly no.

I nice coincidence is that Stewart Brand, who later went on to found the Whole Earth Review and other counterculture icons, was the camera man running the camera at Douglas Engelbart's famous Mother of All Demo demo in 1968 in San Francisco.

Alton Brown (celebrity chef, TV host, etc), was the cinematographer for the video for R.E.M.s “The One I Love”.

Gary Fisher (Fisher Mountain Bikes) had worked light shows for the Grateful Dead and went on to make an officially sanctioned Grateful Dead bicycle[0][1] with proper artwork.

[0] https://www.dead.net/fanphotos/gd-bike-poster

[1] https://forums.bikeride.com/thread-8750.html

Gary Fisher is a literal forefather of mountain biking. "Fisher Mountain Bikes" predecessor was just called "MountainBikes," because "mountain biking" wasn't a thing when they started.

I also initiated some NetBSD mascot concept ideas but i guess people are not that interested in it

https://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-advocacy/2021/01/21/msg...

No really related, but I wish there was a NixBSD. Would switch immediately.

There’s progress.

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/openbsd-nix-is-now-a-thing/255...

Still bugs me FreeBSD replaced Beastie, the reasoning always seemed silly to me. I'm hoping they'll go back to him on the next refresh (which is long overdue IMO).

I get why they changed it, but they could have come up with something better than a horned yoga ball to replace it with.

When I saw an article that linked here, I was thinkiong about Phil Foglio, because I was familiar with the version of the logo that he drew.

yet another misogynist corrupt weirdo at the heart of open source, computing, and film.

and he gets praised for drawing "a version" of something that someone else created. ohhh the irony.

"The Director of 'Toy Story'" is a pretty understated way to refer to John Lasseter [0], who effectively headed up all the Pixar projects (on the creative side) from the beginning of the company, and directed 5 of their films.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lasseter

Ok, we've put John Lasseter up there now.

I knew him through his introduction to the English version of Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away :)

He had won his first Oscar for the animated short Tin Toy in 1989, and had been nominated for Luxo Jr. a couple years prior. I first read about him and Pixar in an article about that those in a electronics magazine back then. What I read about had a profound impact on me, making me want to learn how to program computer graphics.

John Lasseter is a creep who was ousted from Pixar after a long history of sexually harassing employees: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/john-las...

I don't see how that's relevant.

It is interesting how the creations we cherish as a society become separate from the creator. Not even a creator's misconduct can reappropriate the art from society.

“To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim." ― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

"Oh, this from the posing somdomite" - Wilde's contemporaries.

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple." - The Importance of Being Earnest

I assume you refuse to use gcc, emacs, etc. because of their creator, refuse to use JavaScript anywhere on the web, never take an Uber etc.?

Or is it just the cases where it's convenient to virtue signal?

I also find it ironic that you posted a Steve Jobs quote in a comment recently...

Is this about Stallman? I don't consider him to have done anything wrong, and so yes I sure do use gcc, and do at least prefer as little js as possible though I simply have no control over that, and in fact never use uber, and specifically because of the company, even though it would be convenient.

Of course you can't do any of this 100% because the world is interconnected and interdependent and countless infinite things are indirect.

But so what? You can still care and still try and still exert your own one-persons share of influence, even if it's only avoiding Amazon when you can, instead of just buying everything through them.

That is worth doing and 100% better than not caring and not bothering, and the value isn't invalidated by being impossible to be absolute.

Stallman did eat skin from his feet multiple times while on stage and may have asked people to serve him tea in an uncouth way multiple times. I do actually think about that when I compile from source and yes it bothers me a little but I soldier on.

That bothers you, but Stallman's decades of advocacy for sex with minors and the numerous accusations of harrassment against him don't?

I'm not saying it should, but it seems you're either unaware of, or don't consider relevant, the most actually troublesome aspects of the man.

No you are absolutely right and I was being tongue in cheek. Yeah he is basically toxic waste in terms of association. It’s a shame his personal toxicity will have had a negative effect not just on people vulnerable to predation perhaps even directly but also it will have undermined the popularity of FOSS more broadly and taken oxygen out of the air for things that aren’t Richard Stallmans scandalous behavior.

He did not advocate sex with minors good grief.

The mans worst crime is singing.

Yes because that particular quote is funny to me, the idea that boot up time is equivalent to harming someone to death is low key hilarious.

People in the thread are dropping all kinds of trivia about Pixar and BSD but possibly the biggest news about the subject of the article in the last 5 years is that he was ousted from his role at Pixar for sexual harassment. Feels relevant.

He is an incredibly talented director and storyteller. I can understand why his well documented history of sexual misconduct may not feel relevant. Apparently, the situation was so bad that Disney assigned a "minder" to him to keep him out of trouble.

On the other hand, his great creative talent should not diminish the fact that he was a creep of a boss if you happened to be female.

He's a complex person. If we want to talk about the great things he has done, I think we should also remind ourselves of the bad stuff.

I'm not sure I agree with that last part. He drew the BSD logo. I don't need to audit his failings and indiscretions to note that that's an interesting factoid.

That isn't what the article you linked says. It continually starts suggesting that, and then rows back to say it's not what actually happened.

Interesting that you can't spot these things.

He's been credibly accused by many people, it's an open secret in the industry, and he took a 6 month leave of absence and then never came back and started a new studio. Oh and he publicly acknowledged unspecified "missteps".

For someone who's had so many successful movies you'd think they'd defend him to the hilt if he was innocent?

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/john-las...

> For someone who's had so many successful movies you'd think they'd defend him to the hilt if he was innocent?

You could make the same argument about Fatty Arbuckle, who was falsely accused of rape and manslaughter in the 1920’s and completely blacklisted from Hollywood despite probably being completely innocent. I don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other about Lasseter but these things are driven by Hollywood politics more than anything. Just look at how long they kept supporting Roman Polanski.

If you're going to throw shade like that, at least get it right. He wasn't working at Pixar anymore, he was the head of all of Disney Animation, which included Pixar.

You are half right. He was chief creative officer at both Walt Disney and Pixar Animation at the time he went on leave.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2017/11/21/d...

Steve Jobs was a control freak, a narcissist (for at least his early years), colluded to drive software developer wages down, and treated his adopted(?) daughter poorly, yet we don't seem to need to talk about that every time his name comes up.

Bill Gates apparently had some connection to Jeffrey Epstein that made his wife uncomfortable enough to divorce him, yet we didn't need to bring that up when his book review got posted yesterday.

Maybe we can celebrate and enjoy the good things about a person without needing to continually shame them for the bad things.

There's also Andy Rubin. I think the difference is that Jobs and Gates are such huge cultural icons that we already know about their misdeeds- and in Gates' case he has become a new type of supervillain for a new generation- while Lasseter's are less known.

What? Those all get brought up fairly often, and comparing a narcissistic controlling personality to sexual harrassment is not super useful imo. But agreed that we should talk more about bill gates and Epstein, because as you said if his wife left him for it there ought to be something to that story.

Equally relevant: the subject of that logo—the devil—is also a very bad person. Makes you wonder, did he draw that devil because he's such a bad person? Was he planning it all along?

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