It was tied to magic smoke! But a different of kind. The original requirements called for two logos, one for restricted use, and one for general use. The one that’s being used for general use now was meant to be only for restricted use. The original had a genie bottle from which the swirl came out, the concept was that something very powerful had been unleashed onto the world, free of charge, that stood to change the world. I was inspired by Neil Stephenson’s story The Hole Hawg of Operating Systems - Unix.

Here is a link to the article:

http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html

And here is a link to the two original designs:

https://www.debian.org/logos/

Cheers!