Usenix 2002

Chris Coleman <chrisc@vmunix.com>

I recently spent three days at Usenix 2002 in Monterey CA. I didn't get much time to attend any of the tutorials, because I was standing behind a booth promoting BSD to whoever would listen. However, I did meet a lot of very interesting people.

It's been three years since I was last at Usenix in Monterey. As I contrast my memory of the first one with this years conference, I see a very different market. For one thing, I am on the other side of the booth.

Noticably absent from the vendor booths were the hordes of venture capital funded Linux vendors that made up the bulk of the booths previously. Only companies with a vested interest in the Usenix market space remained. There were a fair number of hardware and book vendors.

Apple was there in force and even sponsored the terminal room. It's a new market for them and though its taken a while, they seem to be adapting to it well. I spent some time showing off my Unix Utilities CD set. I had the beta version with me and most of the Apple staff hadn't seen what it could do yet.

The terminal room and other gathering places with wireless ethernet reception would collect small groups of coders working together on various projects where they normally would have to collaborate online. Although they were right next to each to each other, that didn't stop them from talking to each other via IRC most of the time.

The conference went well, and although very changed from what it was three years ago it still turned out to be a profitable venture for me in terms of people I have met and things I learned.