MADDOG'S DOGHOUSE

Remembering the USENIX ATC before its 50th – and last – event in July 2025.

- BY JON "MADDOG" HALL

The final USENIX ATC

Recently, a long-time friend and fellow Bell Labs alum made a comment on my Facebook page about the 50th (and last) Annual Technical Conference (ATC) of the USENIX (usenix.org) organization.

For those of you not familiar with the USENIX organization, they encourage research in advanced computing systems. While often this was oriented around Unix and Unix-like systems, they also encouraged research in other operating systems, concentrating on memory management, new filesystems, networking, and other elements.

They encouraged peer-reviewed research papers and bringing these papers to conferences that were open to all. For a while, they charged to access these papers, but in 2008 they opened up the papers to all over the Internet.

They also offered very focused conferences. Conferences on security and privacy. One of the largest and (in my opinion) best conferences in systems administration was the Large Installation System Administration (LISA) conference which (unfortunately) ended in 2021.