dragon: n. [MIT] A program similar to a daemon, except that
it is not invoked at all, but is instead used by the system to
perform various secondary tasks. A typical example would be an
accounting program, which keeps track of who is logged in,
accumulates load-average statistics, etc. Under ITS, many terminals
displayed a list of people logged in, where they were, what they
were running, etc., along with some random picture (such as a
unicorn, Snoopy, or the Enterprise), which was generated by the
`name dragon'. Usage: rare outside MIT -- under Unix and most other
OSes this would be called a `background demon' or daemon. The
best-known Unix example of a dragon is `cron(1)'. At SAIL, they
called this sort of thing a `phantom'.
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