The USENIX Association is the Advanced Computing Systems Association. It was founded in 1975 under the name "Unix Users Group," focusing primarily on the study and development of Unix and similar systems. In June 1977, a lawyer from AT&T Corporation informed the group that they could not use the word UNIX as it was a trademark of Western Electric (the manufacturing arm of AT&T until 1995), which led to the change of name to USENIX. It has since grown into a respected organization among practitioners, developers, and researchers of computer operating systems more generally. Since its founding, it has published a technical journal entitled ;login:.
USENIX was started as a technical organization. As commercial interest grew, a number of separate groups started in parallel, most notably the Software Tools Users Group (STUG), a technical adjunct for Unix-like tools and interface on non-Unix operating systems, and /usr/group, a commercially oriented user group.
USENIX has a special interest group for system administrators, LISA, formerly SAGE.
The USENIX Annual Technical Conference is a conference of computing professions sponsored by the USENIX association. The conference includes computing tutorials, and a single track technical session for presenting refereed research papers, SIG meetings, and BoFs.
There have been several notable announcements and talks at USENIX. In 1995, James Gosling announced "Oak", which was to become the Java Programming Language. John Ousterhout first presented TCL here, and Usenet was announced here.
It is considered one of the most prestigious operating systems venues and has an 'A' rating from the Australian Ranking of ICT Conferences (ERA).