UNIX Daemon Toddler Costume

For Halloween 2008, our son Quincy, then age 2.5 Earth years, decided to dress up as his favorite computing mascot, the UNIX Daemon, also known as "Beastie" or the BSD Daemon. His other favorites are Tux, the Linux Kernel's Penguin mascot (what adult or child wouldn't love a bird as a mascot), and the GNU Gnu.

For those of you who aren't UNIX-fiends like Quincy's father, a daemon is a program on a UNIX-like system that runs constantly in the background: there's a daemon that sends mail, one that receives mail, a daemon that performs scheduled tasks (cron), one that serves webpages (like this one!) and in modern UNIX workstations there are media players that act as daemons. They are always there, but you don't see them...hence the name.

Note to purists: although this character is mostly known as a mascot of FreeBSD nowadays, he does date to well before the existence of FreeBSD, and was representative of UNIX at that time. I point this out because I am not a FreeBSD user (I prefer GNU/Linux), but I do love the UNIX ideal, and think Beastie is a great mascot.

The most typical BSD Daemon image. BSD Daemon Copyright 1988 by Marshall Kirk McKusick. All Rights Reserved.

Quincy holding the BSD Book. The horns are just your run-of-the-mill devil horns that are available at Halloween. I preferred these to any sort of mask that might cover Quincy's face or a hood with the horns sewn on (less work for my seamstress, uh, wife).

The original UNIX Daemon cartoon. Read the story of its creation. In this picture you see daemons playing on a jungle-gym of pipes built over a realistic PDP-11 (note the tape drives and toggle switches in the center). Two bit-buckets (labeled "null") are present.

We got Quincy a bucket for trick-or-treating deciding that Beastie should carry a bucket labeled "null" in honor the /dev/null device node. If you want to throw away the output of a command in UNIX, you concatenate it onto /dev/null with >> /dev/null This "bit-bucket" is a "null output device" from which no output shall ever be returned. /dev/null is also a great way of showing that everything in UNIX is a file, even when it is, effectively, nothing. The word "null" is painted on the bucket with glow-in-the-dark paint; I accidentally used a stenciling brush, and had to dab the paint on one blob at a time, which gave the letters a ghoulish appearance.

Take a closer look at the original Beasties with bit-buckets.

The sneakers are a cute but unexplained part of Beastie's costume. In many early depictions, Beastie does not wear sneakers. However, we did find children's Converse All-Stars at Babies R Us that fit Quincy perfectly, and it was easier than fashioning some sort of "daemon-claw." He is always excited to wear his "Beastie Sneakers."

Quincy with his pitchfork. Beastie carries a pitchfork to symbolize the UNIX system call "fork" that splits processes into parent and child processes.

And of course, the most fun is trick-or-treating. The tail is red felt with polyester batting sewn into a tube with a point on the end. The felt was left over from our other son's black widow spider costume.