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jle17 | 3 years ago

According to the jargon file, ITS called daemons dragons and SAIL (whatever this is ?) called them phantoms. Add to that zombie processes on Unix and user rights angels from FreeBSD's capsicum and the fact that processes come from executable files in ELF format and have debug infos in DWARF and it is quite the fantasy menagerie.

I suggest Kobold for whatever kind of process we need to name next.

discuss

markus_zhang|3 years ago

Read a few articles and even novels from the 80s and poeple constantly refer very good programmers as "wizards". Also the sub culture of DND sticks hard. I guess most likely the reason was computer programming back in 80s was mostly low level considering one had to use assembly/C/Pascal for serious PC programming.

xtiansimon|3 years ago

“Do you want to play a game?”

Text based games on main frames.

The influence could be the parallel time lines of the rise of swords and sorcery and computing in the 1970s and 80s.

And what makes a good hostname anyway? Obscure (not to be confused) unique, memorable?

dredmorbius|3 years ago

And of course: the Scary Devil Monastery.

usrbinbash|3 years ago

"This is not a rabble of mindless interfaces. These are uruk-hai. Their scans are deep, and their firewalls broad."

gumby|3 years ago

SAIL was the Stanford AI Lab. Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy founded the MIT AI lab; John was recruited by Stanford and started a lab there. It was in the lovely DC Powers building in the foothills -- despite what you would think "DC Powers" was actually someone's name!

It also had a PDP-10 and a TV system but of course it's own implementation of both the TV hardware and the PDP-10 O/S (WAITS)

I can't find a picture of the building unfortunately -- it was really cool.

Rediscover|3 years ago

Are these some pictures You were looking for?

http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures/AIlab/

Search the directory for DCPowers.

peter303|3 years ago

Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab

Older than Stanford Computer Science department

layer8|3 years ago

We also have GNOME and ORCs [0], and there’s GobLin [1].

[0] https://lwn.net/Articles/728339/

[1] https://distro.misiones.gob.ar/goblin/bienvenida/en-index.ht...

mr_toad|3 years ago

> processes come from executable files in ELF format and have debug infos in DWARF and it is quite the fantasy menagerie

We don’t call new processes spawn for nothing!

polynomial|3 years ago

> SAIL (whatever this is ?)

Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

cstross|3 years ago

Wrong: it's the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (founded 1962 by John McCarthy -- who co-authored the document that first defined AI as a field, invented LISP, time sharing, and garbage collection, heavily influenced the design of ALGOL, and so on: one of the pioneers of computer science):

https://ai.stanford.edu/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCarthy_(computer_scient...

1vuio0pswjnm7|3 years ago

Interesting, only in the anecdotal sense, that in today's world of incessant "AI" hype, a top commenter on HN would not have encountered the SAIL acronym.

toponaut|3 years ago

I was at Stanford for nearly 10 years. Not formally in CS or AI, granted, but SAIL doesn't ring a bell for me. Maybe it's just not that well known.

queuebert|3 years ago

Maybe Stanford is not as important as it thinks.