When the 3D animation program Maya first came out, it was only originally available for SGI computers, and included a simple SGI based render manager called the Dispatcher, which it had inherited from Wavefront. When Maya was first ported to run on Windows, however, Alias|Wavefront did not port Dispatcher, so anyone who wanted to use their Windows machines to render had to manage the machines manually.
This was the genesis of Smedge: a simple Windows tool to queue and monitor your Maya renders. When looking for inspiration, one of my fellow artists had a simple shell script system called Skedge which was meant for scheduling Wavefront renders. We decided that this new tool was a sort of “Skedge for Maya,” which became the tool we all know and love, Smedge!