The BSD daemon is one of those computer mascots that escaped the operating system and became part of hacker culture. His official home still looks appropriately like something maintained by people who care more about provenance than redesigns.
The History of the BSD Daemon lives at McKusick.com.
The first thing the page clears up is the name. The daemon is not officially named Chuck. Marshall Kirk McKusick says that name came from an advertising myth associated with Walnut Creek. If you insist on calling the character something, the site suggests “beastie,” a play on the letters BSD.
From there the site becomes a surprisingly detailed history of Unix culture expressed through drawings, book covers, T-shirts, conference swag, legal permissions, and inside jokes.
The black-and-white 4.2BSD daemon appeared on the 4.2BSD manuals published by USENIX. Years later, a group at Kansas State University decided they wanted a UNIX shirt. They scanned the old artwork, edited it on a Sun workstation, printed copies, and sat around with colored pencils until they found a color scheme they liked. The initial run was only about forty shirts.
The 4.3BSD daemon has another famous connection: the artwork used on The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System was drawn by John Lasseter, long before his name became universally associated with Pixar.
The site also preserves the stranger administrative side of mascot history. McKusick has a page explaining how the daemon artwork may be used, why permissions matter, and why he became serious about protecting the figure after nearly losing control of it to a company. There are galleries covering FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, USENIX, “!DOS,” Lego versions, cakes, shirts, and other mutations of the character.
This is where an old personal website can beat a modern summary page. It does not merely tell you that Beastie exists. It preserves who made which version, what it appeared on, why particular shirts were printed, and how the image moved through actual Unix communities.
The page is basically oral history with HTML around it.
You can still wander through the BSD daemon archive and follow the individual designs into their stories. CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains more sites where the people involved in computing history simply documented it themselves instead of waiting for somebody else to summarize it later.