Related:

Usenix ATC Announcement

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43933511

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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?