When was the ligature (æ) removed from daemon and replaced with "ae"?
score:7
(Statements marked * are based upon the online OED)
History
The word appears to have originated with "δαιμόνιον" in ancient Greek.* It then passed through the Latin "daemōn" and the Western European "demon" (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, German).* Old English had the word "demon".*
The earliest cited use of "daemon" (with the ligatures) is from 1594 and both spellings continued to be used until the end of the 18thC* when "demon" won out. The alternatives "daemon" and "daimon"* after that seem to have only been used in an antiquarian manner. The use of a ligature in this period is stylistic only, unlike Old English where it was a separate vowel.²
Technology
From the late 19thC onwards the rise of the typewriter mitigated against the traditional printer's ligatures. As computer printers became more common they also used a highly restricted character set (EBCDIC or ASCII-6, later ASCII-7), for instance it was common in the 1970s to receive letters from government printed entirely in uppercase monotype. With lithography taking over from letterpress even some short-run books were typewritten and not set. Hence "daemon" could only be set with the "a" and "e" as separate characters.
Programs
The earliest cited use of "daemon" is from 1971* a time when no standard computer would be able to set the ligature. As others have pointed out, ASCII-7 and EBCDIC dominated the industry for many years. Although word processors etc., started to introduce Latin-1 and later Unicode, most OSs continued to use exclusively 7-bit ASCII and EBCDIC until the expansion of the WWW post 2008.¹
It appears (further research needed) that "daemon" was adopted as an uncommon historic spelling to differentiate it from the standard "demon". There also is a suggestion ("also interpreted") that it could be from the acronym: "disk and execution monitor" or "device and ...".*
TL;DR
"Daemon" was not commonly used prior to *NIX. The ligature was only common in professionally set books prior to c. 2008. Type- and computer- written material used non-ligature settings.
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