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

[arnold at skeeve.com]

Dan Cross <crossd at 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 And is it just me, or has that largely been superceded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.

Sys admin was a thing in the mid-80s already; I worked as one at the Emory
U Computing Center for several years, ~ 1985 - 1990.  Around then USENIX
started the LISA (Large Installation System Administratin) workshops.
Clem can undoubtedly tell us exactly when.

And yes, SRE + dev ops seem to have displaced that, with SRE focusing
more on keeping the bazillions of systems up and running, and DevOps on
things like build and CI/CD systems.

Personally, I'm glad to have gained the sys admin experience, but I
don't want to do it for a living; it's much more fun building product
and letting someone else have the headaches. :-)

Arnold