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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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
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
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
"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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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