Roger’s /proc by Ryan Zezeski

This was an awesome talk about the rationale and history of /proc, what ultimately became an elegant interface to a tremendously complex system of processes and their scheduling.

Life of an Airline Flight: What Systems Get You From Here to There via the Air by Adam Fletcher

This talk was a very enjoyable overview of the scheduling, inventory management, reservation and other systems that coordinate behind the scenes to enable us to fly commercially. It was particularly interesting to see that systems like SABRE were so ahead of their time, enough so that they’ve been able to avoid much innovation for the last five or so decades! I’m looking forward to reading Adam’s book recommendation Hard Landing.

This was a great talk, and excellent choice of topic for a 20min talk. Breanne obviously loves man pages and hopes you will too :)

Persistent Virtual Memory in the Great New Operating System In the Sky by James Larkby-Lahet

This was a very interesting talk about a couple of old systems that anticipated the cloud computing trend that wouldn’t arrive for another decade or two. I personally spent much of the talk thinking about what ideas from GNOSIS/KeyKOS could see a resurgence once we nonvolatile RAM becomes cheap and prevalent. Unfortunately it looks like James had a slide on this that he skipped over for lack of time :(

7074 says Hello World by Marianne Bellotti

It looks like this session wasn’t recorded, which is a shame because it was a fascinating look at some of Marianne’s work with the USDS, helping to make sense of how the federal government is using some wonderful old (and new) mainframes.

Less Ado About NTP by Bryan Fink

Bryan really knows and loves NTP. This was a solid intro, shorter but just as clear as his recent Papers We Love talk.

Weenix: The system that inspired generations of systems lovers by Jordan Hendricks

It was great to hear about weenix, a teaching operating system implemented by students at Brown. I hadn’t heard of it, despite using MIT’s similar project JOS with students at Bradfield. The creators of projects like this put an enormous amount of work into them; I’m sure they’re glad to see them changing the lives of folk like Jordan.

The Charming Genius of the Apollo Guidance Computer by Brian Troutwine

This was a favorite talk of mine, about an amazingly effective and practical system from the glory years of US technological progress. A must watch in my opinion.

This was another great choice of topic for a 20min talk, and a very enjoyable talk. I loved hearing about the history of BGP; it was a surprise to see how… err… improvised it was, given the technical calibre of its designers.

Interrupts, that which scared Djikstra by Irfan Ahmad

This was a very illuminating talk, introducing the design decisions involved in the introduction of interrupts, and developing as far as Irfan’s own interesting work into interrupt coalescing in virtual machines.

Lessons from the Cell: What Software Developers Can Learn From Biochemical Systems by Sarah Lohmeier

I think I must have been hypocaffeinated at this point because I don’t recall much about Sarah’s talk unfortunately :(

The Design of the UNIX Terminal by Jesse Hathaway

This was a great talk that covered both terminals and the UNIX shell. We often see students with a hazy understanding of the differences between these (and terminal emulators) so it’s good to have somewhere to point them now!

A Race Detector Unfurled by Kavya Joshi

Kavya does a great job of introducing the motivation for a race detector and explaining the use of ThreadSanitizer in Go. It looks like she also gave a longer version of the talk at this year’s Strangeloop.

Down memory lane: Two decades with the slab allocator by Bryan Cantrill

No surprise that Bryan’s talk was one of the most entertaining. Jeff Bonwick’s slab allocator was a great innovation, designed well enough to continue serving its purpose without any dramatic changes for over two decades. Bryan’s enthusiasm for it and the connection to his own history was a joy to experience.

DNS and the Art of Making Systems “Just Complex Enough” by Alex Wilson

Am I allowed to have another favorite? This was another excellently crafted, entertaining talk, covering a good amount of the genesis and design of DNS. As with many talks, there were some interesting aspects of the history of the protocol that I hadn’t seen covered elsewhere.

“You are Not Expected to Understand This”, But You Will by Arun Thomas

This was one of my favorite talks of the day, explaining the context switching code both in UNIX v6 and FreeBSD. Nothing should be a black box, even when Dennis Ritchie says it’s ok!

An AWK love story by Cody Mello

AWK is a fantastic little language that Cody obviously loves and does a great job of selling :)

UTF-8 by Daniel Morsing

UTF-8 is an impressive and commonly confused technology so it’s great that Daniel did a talk on this. It was ambitious, though, since it’s so hard to beat Joel Spolsky’s The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

Amelia definitely took a different approach to her talk and touched on some disparate but interesting ideas through a lens that many of us wouldn’t have used before, that of the “card” as a common motif in computing. I agree that cards in computing are interesting, but if you only have 20min to dedicate to the topic I would go first to James Burke’s bit in Connections about the evolution of the Jacquard loom and how it ultimately lead to Hollerith’s tabulator.