The end of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference

[Posted May 7, 2025 by corbet]

On the 50th anniversary of the USENIX organization, its flagship Annual Technical Conference (ATC) is coming to an end.

For the past two decades, as more USENIX conferences have joined the USENIX calendar by focusing on specific topics that grew out of ATC itself, attendance at ATC has steadily decreased to the point where there is no longer a critical mass of researchers and practitioners joining us. Thus, after many years of experiments to adapt this conference to the ever-changing tech landscape and community, the USENIX Board of Directors has made the difficult decision to sunset USENIX ATC.

Many important technologies first saw the light of day at this event.

Important ATC talks

Posted May 7, 2025 8:07 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (2 responses)

The list of seminal ATC presentations included in the announcement is impressive. It is also noteworthy, though, that this list ends in 1998 — 27 years ago. That, of course, is about the time that the mutual assured distruction of the Unix wars was reaching its conclusion and, of course, when it became more widely clear that Linux was an important force.

Important ATC talks

Posted May 7, 2025 10:23 UTC (Wed) by pm215 (subscriber, #98099) [Link] (1 responses)

Also I feel like 1998 is around the point where if you had done some cool new Unix related thing then you could simply put something up on a website and that would be more a more effective way of getting the word out about it than giving a presentation to a generic Unix conference.

Though I think they could have also for instance added the Valgrind paper (ATC 2005) to the list (to me this seems like a majorly cool technical development that saw subsequent wide adoption and so was genuinely influential), and there might be others lurking in the post-2000 conferences too.

Important ATC talks

Posted May 7, 2025 21:04 UTC (Wed) by amk (subscriber, #19) [Link]

Dtrace was also introduced at a Usenix event. Confirming that led me to 2004 "Whither Usenix?" post by Bryan Cantrill which seems prophetic in retrospect.

Sad to see it go

Posted May 8, 2025 23:00 UTC (Thu) by noahm (subscriber, #40155) [Link] (1 responses)

I attended numerous ATCs and LISAs between 2000 (LISA in New Orleans) and 2018 (ATC in Boston). So much interesting research was presented at these conferences, and I’m really sad to see that they’re both gone. USENIX as an organization continues to host some excellent events, but one wonders for how much longer. The loss of their two flagship conferences doesn’t bode well.

A couple of papers stand out in my memory, one from my first USENIX conference and one from my latest:
1. Peep (The Network Auralizer): Monitoring Your Network With Sound https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/procee...
2. The Battle of the Schedulers: FreeBSD ULE vs. Linux CFS https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc18/presentation/bouron

Sad to see it go

Posted May 13, 2025 3:54 UTC (Tue) by apple4ever (guest, #164280) [Link]

I don't think they are long for this world. I'm a member of LOPSA and we were trying to return to the mothership, but they didn't want us back and I get the feeling they were struggling. We shall see.