USENIX is an American

501(c)(3) nonprofit A 501(c)(3) organization is a United States corporation, trust, unincorporated association or other type of organization exempt from federal income tax under section 501(c)(3) of Title 26 of the United States Code. It is one of the 29 types of 5 ...

membership organization A membership organization is any organization that allows people or entities to subscribe, and often requires them to pay a membership free or "subscription". Membership organizations typically have a particular purpose, which involves connecting p ...

based in

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland, Cali ...

and founded in 1975 that supports advanced computing systems,

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

(OS), and

computer networking A computer network is a collection of communicating computers and other devices, such as printers and smart phones. In order to communicate, the computers and devices must be connected by wired media like copper cables, optical fibers, or b ...

research. It organizes several conferences in these fields.

History

USENIX was established in 1975 under the name "Unix Users Group," focusing primarily on the study and development of the

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

OS family and similar systems. In June 1977, a lawyer from

AT&T Corporation AT&T Corporation, an abbreviation for its former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, was an American telecommunications company that provided voice, video, data, and Internet telecommunications and professional services to busi ...

informed the group that they could not use the word "Unix" in their name as it was a trademark of

Western Electric Western Electric Co., Inc. was an American electrical engineering and manufacturing company that operated from 1869 to 1996. A subsidiary of the AT&T Corporation for most of its lifespan, Western Electric was the primary manufacturer, supplier, ...

(the manufacturing arm of AT&T until 1995), which led to the change of name to USENIX. Since its founding, it has published a technical

journal A journal, from the Old French ''journal'' (meaning "daily"), may refer to: *Bullet journal, a method of personal organization *Diary, a record of personal secretive thoughts and as open book to personal therapy or used to feel connected to onesel ...

titled '' ;login:''. USENIX was started as a technical organization. As commercial interest grew, a number of separate groups started in parallel, most notably the Software Tools Users Group (STUG), a technical adjunct for Unix-like tools and interface on non-Unix operating systems, and /usr/group, a commercially oriented user group. USENIX's founding President was Lou Katz.

Conferences

USENIX hosts numerous conferences and symposia each year, including: * USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI) (was bi-annual till 2020) *USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security) *USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST) *USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI) *

USENIX Annual Technical Conference The USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC, or, canonically, USENIX) is a conference of computing researchers sponsored by the USENIX association. The conference includes computing tutorials, and a single track technical session for present ...

(USENIX ATC) (co-located with OSDI since 2021) *SREcon, a conference for engineers focused on site reliability, systems engineering, and working with complex distributed systems at scale *LISA, the

Large Installation System Administration Conference Large means of great size. Large may also refer to: Mathematics * Arbitrarily large, a phrase in mathematics * Large cardinal, a property of certain transfinite numbers * Large category, a category with a proper class of objects and morphisms (o ...

*Enigma, a conference focused on practical privacy and security expertise and knowledge sharing in a welcoming and inclusive environment

Publications

USENIX publishes a magazine called '';login:'' that appears four times a year. From 2021, it has become an all-digital magazine and openly accessible. '';login:'' content informs the community about practically relevant research, useful tools, and relevant events. From 1988–1996, USENIX published the quarterly journal ''Computing Systems'', about the theory and implementation of advanced computing systems in the UNIX tradition. It was published first by the University of California Press, then by the MIT Press. The issues have been scanned and are online.

Open access

USENIX conferences became

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...

in 2008. Since 2011, they have provided audio and video recordings of paper presentations and conference talks in their open-access materials, free of charge.

USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award

This award, also called the "Flame" award, has been presented since 1993. *2024

Arnold Robbins Arnold may refer to: People * Arnold (given name), a masculine given name * Arnold (surname), a German and English surname Places Australia * Arnold, Victoria, a small town in the Australian state of Victoria Canada * Arnold, Nova Scotia ...

*2023

Steven M. Bellovin Steven M. Bellovin is a researcher on computer networking and computer security, security who has been a professor in the computer science department at Columbia University since 2005. Previously, Bellovin was a fellow at AT&T Labs Research in F ...

Matt Blaze Matt Blaze is an American researcher who focuses on the areas of secure systems, cryptography, and trust management. He is currently the McDevitt Chair of Computer Science and Law at Georgetown University, and is on the board of directors of the ...

, and Susan Landau *2022 Warren Toomey *2021 (no award) *2020 Chet Ramey *2019

Margo Seltzer Margo Ilene Seltzer is an American computer scientist. She is currently the Canada 150 Research Chair in Computer Systems and the Cheriton Family Chair in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. Previously, Seltzer was the Herchel ...

*2018 Eddie Kohler *2014 Thomas E. Anderson *2012

John Mashey John R. Mashey (born 1946) is an American computer scientist, director and entrepreneur. He is a consultant for Techviser, a boutique consulting firm. Career Mashey holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Pennsylvania State University, where he de ...

*2011 Dan Geer *2010

Ward Cunningham Howard G. Cunningham (born May 26, 1949) is an American computer programmer who developed the first wiki Excerpt from 2014 book '' The Innovators''. and was a co-author of the '' Manifesto for Agile Software Development''. Called a pioneer, and ...

*2009 Gerald J. Popek *2008 Andrew S. Tanenbaum *2007 Peter Honeyman *2006

Radia Perlman Radia Joy Perlman (; born December 18, 1951) is an American computer programmer and network engineer. She is a major figure in assembling the networks and technology to enable what we now know as the Internet. She is most famous for her inventi ...

*2005

Michael Stonebraker Michael Ralph Stonebraker (born October 11, 1943) is an American computer scientist specializing in database, database systems. Through a series of academic prototypes and commercial startups, Stonebraker's research and products are central to m ...

*2004 M. Douglas McIlroy *2003 Rick Adams *2002

James Gosling James Arthur Gosling (born 19 May 1955) is a Canadian computer scientist, best known as the founder and lead designer behind the Java (programming language), Java programming language. Gosling was elected a member of the National Academy of E ...

*2001 The

GNU Project The GNU Project ( ) is a free software, mass collaboration project announced by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Its goal is to give computer users freedom and control in their use of their computers and Computer hardware, computing dev ...

an
all its contributors
*2000 W. Richard Stevens *1999 "The

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

Community at Large" *1998

Tim Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, the HTML markup language, the URL system, and HTTP. He is a professorial research fellow a ...

*1997 Brian W. Kernighan *1996 The Software Tools Users Group ( Dennis E. Hall, Deborah Scherrer, Joe Sventek) *1995 The Creation of

USENET Usenet (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP, Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Elli ...

by Jim Ellis,

, and

Tom Truscott Tom Truscott is an American computer scientist best known for creating Usenet with Jim Ellis, when both were graduate students at Duke University. He is also a member of ACM, IEEE, and Sigma Xi. One of his first endeavors into computers was wr ...

*1994 Networking Technologies *1993 Berkeley UNIX

References

External links

USENIX: The Advanced Computing Systems AssociationOfficial USENIX YouTube Channel
{{Authority control 1975 establishments in the United States Organizations established in 1975 Organizations based in Berkeley, California 501(c)(3) organizations Unix System administration Lifetime achievement awards