Developer Mike O'Brien, who was working as a bonded locksmith at the time, opened a wall safe in Foglio's Chicago apartment after a roommate had "split town" without leaving the combination.

In return Foglio agreed to draw T-shirt artwork for O'Brien, who gave him some Polaroid snaps of a PDP-11 system running UNIX along with some notions about visual puns having to do with pipes, demons/daemons, forks, a "bit bucket" named /dev/null, etc.

[3] Foglio's drawing showed four happy little red daemon characters carrying tridents and climbing about on (or falling off of) water pipes in front of a caricature of a PDP-11 and was used for the first national UNIX meeting in the US (which was held in Urbana, Illinois).

His original drawing was then apparently lost, shortly after having been sent to Digital Equipment Corporation for use in an advertisement; all known copies are from photographs of surviving T-shirts.

[4] The later, more popular versions of the BSD Daemon were drawn by animation director John Lasseter beginning with an early greyscale drawing on the cover of the Unix System Manager's Manual published in 1984 by USENIX for 4.2BSD.

About four years after this Lasseter drew his widely known take on the BSD Daemon for the cover of McKusick's co-authored 1988 book, The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD Operating System.

From 1994 to 2004, the NetBSD project used artwork by Shawn Mueller as a logo, featuring four BSD Daemons in a pose similar to the famous photo, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima.

Lithographically, the scanned Lasseter drawing is not line art and however drawn neither scaled easily in a wide range of sizes nor rendered appealingly in only two or three colours.

A contest to create a new FreeBSD logo began in February 2005 and a scalable graphic which somewhat echoes the BSD Daemon's head was chosen the following October, although "the little red fellow" has been kept on as an official project mascot.