USENIX Timeline

Industry Firsts | Internationalization | Community Service

USENIX members are more than UNIX users; they are early adopters of ground-breaking computer technology. USENIX gatherings have grown into highly technical conferences at which a number of new technologies have been introduced and discussed. Our conferences have launched many new projects and developed programs around growing technical communities such as system administration, security, Linux, and open source long before they became the buzz in the mainstream media.

 

 

June 1969 UNIX developed by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Rudd Canaday, and a small staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories
January 1979 ONYX, the first attempt at genuine UNIX hardware, announced at USENIX conference
January 1982 DEC unveils the creation of its UNIX product at the USENIX Technical Conference
January 1983 Eric Allman presents the first paper on Sendmail, "Mail Systems and Addressing in 4.2BSD"
1984 Sendmail replaces Delivermail and offers greater configurability
1987 USENIX launches UUNET Internet Service Provider project as a member service
April 1987 The first LISA Workshop, chaired by Rob Kolstad and Alix Vasilatos, brings in 75 attendees
February 1988 Athena, the first light on Kerberos and the X Window system, presented at a USENIX Conference
August 1988 USENIX holds the first UNIX Security Symposium
1989 Tom Christiansen makes his first Perl presentation as an Invited Talk during the USENIX Summer Technical Conference
1989 UUNET splits from USENIX to become a separate commercial entity
1990 John Ousterhout presents Tcl at a USENIX Technical Conference
November 1991 First USENIX Mach Workshop
August 1993 First Symposium on Mobile and Location Independent Computing
November 1994 USENIX holds the first Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation
January 1995 The first talk on Oak (later JAVA) given as a Work-in-Progress report at the USENIX Winter Technical Conference
July 1995 First Workshop on Electronic Commerce
June 1998 The FREENIX Track debuts at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference; Miguel de Icaza presents "The GNOME Desktop Environment" (PDF) at a FREENIX session
March 1999 USENIX co-sponsors the first Workshop on Embedded Systems with MIT Media Lab
April 1999 USENIX holds the first Workshop on Intrusion Detection and Network Monitoring and the first Conference on Network Administration
May 1999 The first USENIX SmartCards Workshop is held in Chicago, Illinois
March 2001 USENIX holds the first Linux Kernel Developers Summit
April 2001 USENIX holds the first Java Virtual Machine Research and Technology Symposium
January 2002 USENIX holds the first Conference on File and Storage Technologies
May 2003 USENIX becomes the sponsor of the Ninth Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems
May 2003 USENIX and ACM SIGMOBILE jointly sponsor the first International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services
March 2004 USENIX, in cooperation with ACM SIGCOMM and ACM SIGOPS, sponsors the first Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
June 2004 Dan Geer and Microsoft's Chief Security Strategist debate the assertion that the Windows "monoculture" threatens the Internet's safety at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference
May 2014 USENIX holds the first SREcon
May 2015 USENIX holds the first SREcon Europe
January 2016 USENIX holds the first Enigma Conference
May 2017 USENIX holds the first SREcon Asia/Australia