[TUHS] Re: LOC [was Re: Re: Re.: Princeton's "Unix: An Oral History": who was in the team in "The Attic"?

[Stuart Remphrey <stu@remphrey.net>]

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> Never done it myself, but it’d seem the potential for screw-ups is now
infinite and unlimited in time :)

Indeed!

USENIX SREcon generally releases presentations a short while after each
conference.
Some interesting experiences there...
https://www.usenix.org/conferences/byname/925
https://www.usenix.org/srecon

-- Stuart.


On Wed, 9 Nov 2022 at 17:03, steve jenkin <sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au> wrote:

>
> > On 9 Nov 2022, at 19:41, Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > To tie this back to TUHS a little bit...when did being a "sysadmin"
> become a thing unto itself? And is it just me, or has that largely been
> superceded by SRE (which I think of as what one used to, perhaps, call a
> "system programmer") and DevOps, which feels like a more traditional Unix-y
> kind of thing?
> >
> >         - Dan C.
>
> In The Beginning, We were All Programmers…
>
> Machines were smaller, programs simpler and we were closer to the hardware.
> Literally, like the “Unix Room”, in the Attic at Bell Labs.
>
> Admin & Operations weren’t too onerous and “Maintenance” was done by the
> people doing the kernel & systems software, at a guess.
> And maybe hardware was fixed by the Vendor, or super-programmers did the
> plug and play themselves.
>
> As sites got bigger, work became multi-person project ’teams’ and admin
> problems got tricker, while ‘certain people’ did the work.
>
> When Unix became properly commercial - multiple vendors, big manuals,
> support contracts, and a plethora of Unix variants - some Bright People
> created “Unix Training” courses, in many topiocs.
>
> Somewhere around this time, courses and job titles for “System Admin”
> appeared.
>
> Sadly, all this happened without any distinctions in capability &
> ‘levels’, or actual problem solving testing (cf CISCO’s CCIE: 2 days of
> testing, 1st day quizzes on a PC, 2nd day is by invitation. Lab session:
> “fix the broken network in the allotted time”)
>
> SAGE - System Admin Guild, part of USENIX - put together a bunch of small
> books on (Unix) System Admin Topics and tried to guide the development of
> the field.
> After 10 years, I was out of the loop and hadn’t seen anything positive in
> the workplace.
>
> SRE roles & as a discipline has developed, alongside DevOps, into managing
> & fault finding in large clusters of physical and virtual machines.
>
> Never done it myself, but it’d seem the potential for screw-ups is now
> infinite and unlimited in time :)
>
> --
> Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design
> 0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
> PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA
>
> mailto:sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin
>
>

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