"Our radical ideas are now the conventional wisdom"

November 4, 2022 3:21 PM

USENIX is ending the Large Installation System Administration Conference after 35 years. "LISA made LISA obsolete (That's a compliment!)" by Thomas A. Limoncelli takes us back to 1987, when "System administration is important" and "Open systems like TCP/IP and POSIX (Unix) are the future" were radical ideas, and shares LISA history (including: "LISA was LGBT-friendly when other conferences most certainly were not.").

Further history is in "Thirty-Five Years of LISA" by Cory Lueninghoener and Carolyn Rowland.

"USENIX will continue to offer systems engineering-focused content at SREcon".

posted by brainwane (14 comments total)

Aw, this is lovely.

Speaking of "you can be you", in the late 1990s and early 2000s LISA always had a large Goth contingent. Some years the so-called hallway track looked more like fans camping out for a Siouxsie and the Banshees concert. I'm not sure why LISA attracted Goths but I always felt it was a testament to the welcoming nature of the conference.

Ha! I know this one.

Sysadmins are geeks. Geeks like comics and rolelplaying games. The hottest comic in the 90s was The Sandman and the hottest roleplaying game was Vampire: the Masquerade.

Also: it was really easy to get a first-line tech support job in the 90s. It's what the nerdy goth kids did instead of working cafes.
posted by davidwitteveen at 5:01 PM on November 4, 2022 [17 favorites]

it was really easy to get a first-line tech support job in the 90s

Was also easy to get a job that worked vampire hours.
posted by Runes at 5:27 PM on November 4, 2022 [10 favorites]

Goths? Yeah, The IT Crowd was basically a Y2K era documentary.
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:56 PM on November 4, 2022 [5 favorites]

Also, dress codes used to be way more common then. Having valuable tech skills was one of the few ways to get a pass on that. There’s an old joke roughly like this:

Business person 1: “my UNIX administrator wears sandals into the office! I’ve talked with them about it but they still do it!”

Business person 2: pauses “yours wears shoes?”
posted by adamsc at 7:51 PM on November 4, 2022 [19 favorites]

Thanks for posting this! And after reading the articles behind the links I managed to renew my USENIX membership too...very convenient!
posted by UhOhChongo! at 11:51 PM on November 4, 2022

My partner went to many LISA events, and I tagged along once, to that incredible year in San Diego during the wildfires. Holy hell some memories there.
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:21 AM on November 5, 2022

I'd still like to point out that being female presenting at LISA was extremely problematic, having to endure hits and harassment from every unwashed troll, every petulant manchild and every superegotisticial big-fish out of his small pond. Just because it was accepting of wierd didn't mean it was remotely safe.
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:23 AM on November 5, 2022 [17 favorites]

I went to LISA in Boston in....2008? It was so fun to be at an event centered on Unix, and I wish I had been able to go to more. It was neat to get training from my Nerd Heroes.
posted by wenestvedt at 5:50 AM on November 5, 2022

Well, y'know, if you can't get laid at LISA... oh wait, that was what they said about Disclave. Same people, different setting.
posted by inexorably_forward at 7:26 AM on November 5, 2022

Wow. I am so very adjacent to this culture. LISA was too rich for my blood in the days when it would have mattered most to me; UNIX itself was, really. UNIX was not classist, nor was the community around it, but, well, hardware with MMUs cost big money, access to timesharing systems cost money, USENIX membership didn't get handed out to random teenagers. It was hard to break into if you didn't come to it from a pretty traditional education-centered path.

The dotcom / multimedia gulch rise of open systems was amazing to be... near? in? I dunno. Was I there? I mean, I worked at a dot com. But it was a bank. But we invented online banking before that was a thing? And you could walk over to South Park and have lunch with the real revolutionaries if you wanted, right? Hell, I didn't even belong where I was let alone where where I was was pretending to be.

Here I am today, basically a UNIX greybeard of if not the old tradition, at least a pretty good similarity to the old tradition. Never been to LISA. Still don't hold a USENIX card. Root on more machines on more of the planet than would have even fit in my imagination when I was 14. Funny how that plays out.

Anyway, point being, I'm a system administrator. It's literally a part of my identity in a way that's as core to who I am as my ethnic heritage or gender identity.
posted by majick at 8:28 AM on November 5, 2022 [6 favorites]

hottest comic in the 90s was The Sandman and the hottest roleplaying game was Vampire: the Masquerade

[astronaut meme] still are [/astronaut meme]
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:38 AM on November 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

*cries over his slowly dwindling inventory of systems to administrate*

My horizons were small, so I was pretty happy to have systems from Florida to Arizona, but it's all been shrinking for what feels like..nay is a long time now. At least it's easy and low stress these days, I guess. And I haven't been on site in about a decade, so there is that.

I probably should have gotten a real job while the work from home getting was good.
posted by wierdo at 12:11 PM on November 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

re: the shoe thing

engineer boots were a thing back when we were pulling up tiles to run RS-232.
posted by art.bikes at 7:38 PM on November 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

From 1967.

https://multicians.org/thvv/realprogs.html

Real Programmers don't play tennis, or any other sport which requires you to change clothes. Mountain climbing is OK, and Real Programmers wear their climbing boots to work in case a mountain should suddenly spring up in the middle of the computer room.

posted by mikelieman at 9:56 PM on November 5, 2022