At the “Meet The USENIX Board and Staff” birds of a feather (BoF) the wine was flowing, the company good, and the mood predominantly jovial. The USENIX board and staff were present to field questions about the conference and organization and listen to feedback from their members. A large field of questions and comments were specific to the conference itself, the history of USENIX, the board members’ responsibilities and amongst other topics.

Clem Cole, President of USENIX, fielded a question on the history of USENIX and its beginnings. He offered insights into how USENIX was started that there was a common nemesis called Digital Equipment Corporation. At the time, DEC was imposing licensing restrictions on programmers who wanted to port Unix to PDP computers. A group of programmers/system administrators came together to for the first Unix group called USENIX. Since that time, it has grown into the expansive organization it is today including training and fostering academic growth in the areas of computer science.

The details of USENIX’s beginnings are most interesting, considering it contains a great deal of how history has been made with the computer which we use today. The history of USENIX may be followed up with a separate article on the USENIX blog, so stay tuned in.

The responsibilities of the USENIX board still contain the original vision of uniting the computing community and fostering innovation that was present at its inception. Some of the more current responsibilities of the are to review and publish papers from the computer science academic community, and bring students to the conference who would otherwise not be able to afford to attend.

On the educational note – for students, system administrators, programmers and the curious, the training program has become an essential part of the USENIX organization’s efforts in providing excellent training, and is headed up by Mr. Dan Klein.  The people who created the technology we use on a daily basis often deliver the training at USENIX.

USENIX is also active in the standards community with an active representation on various standards committees from Nicholas M. Stoughton, Standards Liaison.

The USENIX board concluded that their responsibility is to deliver the best value to their members, and the best value is the conference content and efforts of the organization year round.