Things that go bump in the night may seem a world away from the computer industry, but the personal computer user may soon be leaving the more routine aspects of data processing to the daemons, phantoms and sprites. These are the names given to a new class of programs designed to perform basic and useful tasks, yet to run in background, almost undetected by the user, reports the New York Times. Although widely used on mainframes and larger minicomputers, these were previously unavailable to smaller personal computers since CP/M and MS-DOS operating systems only allow one program to run at a time. However, with the advent of multi-tasking operating systems such as Digital Research’s Concurrent DOS, Microsoft’s OS/2 and Unix, will support daemon software. As operating systems become more sophisticated, daemon has also evolved. Its uses range from the detection of computer crime, to sorting through and picking out relevent items on electronic news networks, to enabling users to access simple information about other users on the same computer, or network. In the future, programmers predict that daemon programs will become like intelligent assistants, quietly anticipating the requirements of the user.
