Rethinking Academic Publishing in Systems Research

Bryan and Adam discuss the recent announcement of the discontinuation of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC), reminiscing about their own visits to the ATC and the impact of the conference. Long-time Oxide Friend, Tom Lyon, joined to dial the reminiscence back a couple more decades!

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Tom Lyon.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Bryan's blog 2025: RIP USENIX ATC
• OxF s1e13: Put the OS back in OSDI
• Bryan's Lisa 2011 talk: Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos
• Bryan's USENIX 2016 talk: A Wardrobe for the Emperor
• USENIX 2004
  • Gnutella not Nutella
  • USENIX DTrace paper
• USENIX Summer 1994
  • Slab Allocator
  • NFSv3
• WSJ 2006 Technology Innovation Awards
• 0xF s1e18: Dijkstra's Tweetstorm
  • Meeting Dennis Ritchie
• BoF session
  • Birds of a feather flock together
• Freenix
  • 2003
  • 2004
• Rik Farrow ;login: editorial on USENIX 2016
• Bryan's blog 2004: Wither USENIX?
  • blog comments from Werner Vogels
• Systems We Love
• Adam's blog 2004: nohup -p
  • illumos source
• OxF s1e4: from /proc to proc_macro
• Things that don't work as advertised
  • Diffracting trees
  • Cold Fusion
• Adam's blog 2009: Triple-Parity RAID-Z
• Rob Pike 2000: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant
• ZFS paper
• Living Computer Museum (now-dead)
• SDF
• All the Chips that Fit by Tom Lyon
• OxF s2e22: RIP Optane
• History of Programming Languages Conference

If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!