RIP Usenix ATC
19 comments
·May 12, 2025khuey
bcantrill
I definitely agree with you, and apologies if that didn't come through in the piece! (Perhaps the rare case where I undershot on the metaphors?)
One thing I didn't mention but certainly believe: academics were attracted to USENIX ATC because of its attendance count (especially at the height of the Dot Com boom when it had nearly 2,000 attendees!) -- but no one really took apart who was attending or what they were looking for. So the conference became more academic because of the attendee count -- but that it became more academic also drove the attendee count down. (I heard from a lot of practitioners who attended that they struggled to find sessions that were relevant to their work in even the broadest sense.) I know I link to it in the piece, but I think Rik Farrow's piece[0] really got right to the heart of all of this.
[0] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_fal...
khuey
I didn't mean to imply that I disagreed with anything other than that specific point (which perhaps is more nostalgia for the halcyon days of in-person conferences than anything else).
I do think that you correctly identified a major source of the problem back in 2004 as economic factors. I was at Mozilla when Rust was built (though not directly involved) and the sum of Mozilla's investment into Rust over the years easily broke into the 8 digits. Google's investment in Go I'm sure is an order of magnitude or two more than that. This is simply beyond the capacity of any academic institution or grant process. The only academic efforts that get to this level require Acts of Congress (e.g. LIGO, the Human Genome Project, the James Webb Space Telescope, etc).
And anyone who can afford to drop $10M+ into development can find channels for distributing and publicizing their work that don't go through program committees. Open source is definitely a big part of that but I don't think that's the whole story. I'd certainly count CUDA as a major advance in systems software since 2004, for instance.
abetusk
I don't feel like I have a good understanding of all the context but I don't think that's the implication at all. The post does offhandedly mention that doing online only conferences get "more bang for the buck" but the rest of the post and linked articles and talks discuss other aspects and, in my opinion, mirror your last sentiment about it happening to all conferences and journals.
For example, one of the linked talks from 2016 "A Wardrobe for the Emperor" [0] talks about adding a more social website features (stars, likes, comments, feedback, etc.) to arXiv to improve it. He also talks about the "Papers we love" meetups, which are in person.
I think the Usenix ATC is a highlighting a deeper problem and that it is happening across other conferences, journals and disciplines. I don't have a good theory of why. I think Cantrill's observations are part of the puzzle but I don't have a good sense for why things changed so drastically (and I think they have, compared to 20-40 years ago).
Ar-Curunir
[delayed]
glitchc
The big issue may be companies clamping down on divulging details regarding vulnerabilities and mitigations. Cybersecurity is significantly more weaponized now than it was in the 90s and companies might be facing immense pressure to limit the wrong kind of attention.
gnat
Computers and the Internet started with academics. Distributed systems were theoretical before they were practical. The first sites of the Internet were universities and the first non-academic site was a milestone. Harvard and Dartmouth and MIT all contributed to computer design and programming advances. UNIX is a product of a quasi-academic research lab.
The Center of Gravity shifted in the late 90s/early 2000s, I reckon. Real world needed distributed systems, and neural networks, and crypto math, and hardware design, and …
There’s still a place for academic research but it’s a much different place in the Gilded CPU Age. It’s the god of the non-commercial gaps: for a while there if it seemed like it’d make money, someone .com giant with gigabucks of free cash had someone on it. Why work for a university if gigabucks.com is hiring?
Not saying USENIX didn’t have factions. I just question the word “capture” about academics, who invented all this stuff before there was money in it. It feels like retiring the Annual Technical Conference is the final step in Usenix’s capture by industry.
mlyle
I think what they're saying is this:
USENIX ATC at its best was always focused on operations and real use of Unix. It was the Unix User's Group.
But academic CS has a shortage of real publishing opportunities, causing less immediately practical things to flood USENIX ATC and smother it.
Ar-Curunir
Academic CS has no shortage of prestigious or even good publishing venues. Just within systems and networking, there is SOSP, OSDI, NSDI, EuroSys, PODC, DISC, FAST, SIGCOMM, CIDR. If you extend to databases there's also VLDB, SIGMOD, etc. These are all Tier-1/Tier-1.5 venues.
Academic CS didn't take over ATC because of a shortage of venues.
tedunangst
BSDCan is happening in one month, and along with sister conferences, has always kept a good mix of industry and academic work imo. There's a few PhD or masters student projects, but many of the talks are practical industrial work, things that have shipped.
tptacek
The flip side of this, though, is that it has probably never been easier to effectively distribute exciting new systems research, both because of the proliferation of smaller, more focused conferences with public video, and because we've all just gotten better at promoting stuff on the Internet. Usenix at its worst was a gatekeeper rather than a facilitator.
bcantrill
I absolutely agree, and I got to as much in my USENIX ATC 2016 keynote[0]: there are so many vectors now for sharing new ideas, it's almost hard to remember that in the heyday of USENIX ATC, technical conferences were really one of the only ways (along with USENET, really) for practitioners to broadcast a new idea. While there were perhaps upsides to having such limited vectors with respect to high signal, there were of course many more downsides; systems research has been well-served by information connectedness!
[0] https://speakerdeck.com/bcantrill/a-wardrobe-for-the-emperor...
tuckerman
I agree that for a lot of purposes online conferences are a great experience (p99 conf has been really fun for example) but nobody has really cracked the hallway track. I've heard about smaller conferences like Monktoberfest but their smallness being a main appeal necessarily limits their scope. Meetups seem to lack a certain je ne sais quoi. I wonder if someone will either figure out the online hallway track experience or if there is room for a new sort of in-person event?
nmgycombinator
Damn. As someone who has dabbled in OS history research Usenix's archives were a God-send. I hope they continue to maintain them, and that other groups can take up the mantle of hosting cutting-edge computer science research (at least to the extent its still happening).
DonHopkins
It was a fun conference. RIP.
Anybody remember the January 21–23 '87 Winter Usenix in Washington, DC, that got snowed in by the giant "Blizzard of Discontent" with 14 inches of snow that closed down Metro? The beloved/infamous Mayor Marion "The Bitch Set Me Up" Barry was attending the Super Bowl in California at the time, a fine tradition that Ted Cruz honored in Cancun during the February 2021 winter storm in Texas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSRW18ahWG0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5KAw9MHeP0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZSROdXWTTc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTMif8cGlcE
Or the one after it on June 8–12 '87 Summer Usenix in Phoenix, Arizona, where they took everybody to a dude ranch for steak? My friend ||ugh Daniel was a vegetarian, and didn't want steak, so they told him to "git" into that line over "yonder", which he did. When he got to the front of the line, they plopped a half of a chicken onto his plate, like that's what a vegetarian wants to see and eat for dinner.
rootbear
I definitely remember that one, one of the first ATCs I attended. I took an NFS course and the speaker told us that after the class was over for the day, all of the Californians were planning to go out and play in the snow! I had planned to show off my brand new "DEV CAR" license plates at that ATC, but the snow was so bad I took Metro. I still have those tags.
CalChris
Similarly, Stanford's EE380 has slipped from these mortal coils. Brian Cantrill spoke there as well. BITD, EE380 seemed like the Senate of Silicon Valley. Startups would announce at EE380. But then it went from relevance to thinly attended and taped for YouTube to archives.
This wasn't academic capture. There's a simpler explanation. No one goes to talks anymore.
bcantrill
Oh no! I had honestly never heard of EE380 when they asked me to present[0], but I really appreciated the fact that it was (either implicitly or explicitly?) open to the public. I wish I had heard of it earlier, and sorry to see it go!
IMO the implication that the "in-person conference" nature of the forum is what led to its demise rather than its capture by academics/abandonment by industry practitioners is incorrect. I think a better summary of the cause is that most academic research is not that relevant to industry but academics need the prestige of forums like Usenix ATC in a way that industry does not which naturally leads to squeezing industry (and thus much of the relevance) out of the forum over time. I think the same would have happened to a virtual conference/printed journal/etc.