Beastie

Beastie exists because of a joke about terminology. In Unix, a long-running background process is called a daemon, so in 1976 the comic artist Phil Foglio drew a crew of little red devils clambering over a PDP-11 for a USENIX shirt, and the metaphor stuck to the operating system permanently. In 1984 John Lasseter, then at Lucasfilm alongside BSD contributor Sam Leffler, drew a greyscale daemon for the cover of the Unix System Manager's Manual, and four years later he drew the definitive one: red, horned, forked tail, pitchfork in hand, standing in a pair of green sneakers, for the cover of Marshall Kirk McKusick's book on 4.3BSD. McKusick owns the copyright to this day and licenses it more or less on a handshake. The nickname is just BSD pronounced sloppily. What makes the whole thing bittersweet is what happened next: in 2005 FreeBSD ran a logo contest and adopted a glossy red orb, keeping Beastie as a mascot but taking away his actual job. So the strongest piece of character design in the history of Unix, drawn by the man who would go on to direct Toy Story, now sits on an art page while a sphere does the work.