From: hal9@cyberspace.org (Hal Niner)
Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10,alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Puff the Magic Dragon on ITS?
Date: 31 May 2003 08:21:47 -0700
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What was the "Puff the Magic Dragon" on ITS?  Some sort of cron?  ;) 

Reading ITS BUGS I found a message praising it for sending a happy
birthday message to the author (Guy L Steele, I think).

hal

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Subject: Re: Puff the Magic Dragon on ITS?
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>>>>> On 31 May 2003 08:21:47 -0700, Hal Niner ("Hal") writes:

 Hal> What was the "Puff the Magic Dragon" on ITS?  Some sort of cron?  ;) 
 Hal> Reading ITS BUGS I found a message praising it for sending a happy
 Hal> birthday message to the author (Guy L Steele, I think).

PFTHMG DRAGON has a feature for launching batch jobs hourly.
It's main job, though, is to do user accounting (eg. for billing).
The dragon that sends the birthday greetings to users (based on 
their INQUIR entries) is the BDAY program.  It sends mail from
the user-name DRAGON, which INQUIR says is Puff The Magic Dragon.
The other birthday-related program is NAMDRG; the Name Dragon's main
purpose is to maintain a list of logged-in users and free consoles;
this is for continuous real-time status display on the TVs.
Look up the DEMSIG system call to learn how daemons (dragons) are started.