from Hacker News

John Lasseter drew the BSD daemon logo

by jelder on 1/17/24, 5:49 PM with 96 comments

  • by jetrink on 1/17/24, 6:36 PM

    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

  • by gen3 on 1/17/24, 6:40 PM

    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

  • by not2b on 1/17/24, 6:35 PM

    And Debian releases are named for Toy Story characters.
  • by abetusk on 1/17/24, 8:18 PM

    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...

  • by polynomial on 1/17/24, 6:33 PM

    "Lassetter wasn’t the first to draw this, but his version became the most popular." (FTA)
  • by kderbyma on 1/17/24, 8:20 PM

    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
  • by orenlindsey on 1/17/24, 6:43 PM

    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.

  • by jelder on 1/17/24, 8:49 PM

    OP here. If any historians would like to see details from any other parts of this set, just ask.
  • by kristopolous on 1/17/24, 11:09 PM

    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.

  • by hghid on 1/17/24, 10:53 PM

    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!
  • by hnthrowaway0328 on 1/17/24, 7:38 PM

    I love these materialized manuals. Do we still have them for the modern enterprise *nix operating systems such as Redhat and such?
  • by hyuuu on 1/17/24, 6:33 PM

    wow that is actually pretty cool, i wonder what other instances of thought leaders criss crossed to a different industry like that
  • by jaypatelani on 1/18/24, 10:45 AM

    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...

  • by colordrops on 1/17/24, 6:58 PM

    No really related, but I wish there was a NixBSD. Would switch immediately.
  • by tw04 on 1/17/24, 10:22 PM

    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).
  • by quadibloc on 1/19/24, 3:31 AM

    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.
  • by doubloon on 1/18/24, 3:47 AM

    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.

  • by andrewstuart2 on 1/17/24, 6:31 PM

    "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

  • by throwboatyface on 1/17/24, 7:11 PM

    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...