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RIP Usenix ATC


SENIX ATC USENIX made the decision this week to discontinue its flagship Annual Technical Conference. When USENIX was started in 1975 — before the Internet, really — conferences were the fastest vector for practitioners to formally share their ideas, and USENIX ATC flourished.

Speaking for myself, I came up lionizing ATC: I was an undergraduate in the early 1990s, and programs like the USENIX Summer 1994 conference felt like Renaissance-era Florence for systems practitioners. And while my keynote may have been particularly candid, I am not the only one who saw this: Rik Farrow wrote up an excellent piece on my talk for ;login: giving context that I was unaware of — namely that inside of USENIX, this was an issue of concern reaching back decades. So USENIX ATC did finally succumb, and I do view it as a casualty here, asphyxiated by the rough love of academic computer science and its inability to grow beyond the conference model of publishing.

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RIP Usenix ATC