syslog

2002 is the 10th anniversary year for Sys Admin magazine. The first issue was published in May of 1992, and we had about 3,000 paid subscribers at that time. As of December 2001, we reported 33,000 paid subscribers. If you follow such things, you may be interested to know that Sys Admin's renewal rate (paid subscribers who renew their subscriptions) is regularly between 50 and 60% (an excellent rate by industry standards). Our newsstand sales are also consistently high.

Through the years, the "mission statement" of the magazine has been a clear and consistent one -- to provide practical, technical information for UNIX systems administrators. We've not changed our tag line to reflect industry trends or blurred our basic editorial position to attract a wider audience. I compared the results of the very first reader survey to the most recent one and found that our readers' technical interests have remained consistent as well. In response to the question "which topics would you like more information about", "system performance" and "network management" were most frequently mentioned in 1992. Most recently, "security" and "performance tuning" were the top two responses. Ten years ago, the UNIX system most frequently used by Sys Admin readers was System V -- followed by SCO and Sun OS. According to the most recent survey, Linux and Solaris are most frequently used, followed by HP-UX and AIX.

If you're interested in browsing old Sys Admin articles for additional historical tidbits, check out the most recent version of our back issue CD. We recently released Version 7 of the Sys Admin CD-ROM, which includes articles and code from Sys Admin's premiere issue in 1992 through December of 2001. This year, we've added The Perl Journal archives to the CD-ROM -- thus, you also get past issues of The Perl Journal from 1996 through 2001. As always, we offer both HTML and ASCII versions of the articles on the CD. So, when all else fails, you can grep for whatever you're looking for. There are a few exceptions; note that some articles do not appear on the CD either because we couldn't track down the authors or because they chose not to grant permission for their articles to be included. The CD is available online (http://www.sysadminmag.com/extra/cd_order.htm) for $49.95 (or $24.95 for registered owners of the previous version).

If you have suggestions regarding ways we could improve either the CD or the magazine, please send email to me at: aankerholz@cmp.com.

Sincerely yours,

Amber Ankerholz
Editor in Chief