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This wasn't academic capture. There's a simpler explanation. No one goes to talks anymore.
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.
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.…
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.
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 r…
USENIX ATC at its best was always focused on operations and real use of Unix. It was the Unix User's Group.
But academic CS has a shortage of real publishing opportunities, causing less immediately practical things to flood USENIX ATC and smother it.
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 r…
I think what they're saying is this: USENIX ATC at its best was always focused on operations and real use of Unix. It was the Unix User 's Group. But academic CS has a shortage of real publishing opportunities, causing less immediately practical things to flood USENIX ATC and smother it.
Academic CS didn't take over ATC because of a shortage of venues.
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 indust…