Symposium on Operating Systems Principles

The Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), organized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), is one of the most prestigious single-track academic conferences on operating systems.

Before 2023, SOSP was held every other year, alternating with the conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI); starting 2024, SOSP began to be held every year. The first SOSP was held in 1967. It is sponsored by the ACM's Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS).

History
The inaugural conference was held in Gatlinburg, Tennessee on 1–4 October 1967 at the Mountain View Hotel. There were fifteen papers in total, of which three presentations were in the Computer Networks and Communications session. Larry Roberts presented his plan for the ARPANET, a computer network for resource sharing, which at that point was based on Wesley Clark's proposal for a message switching network. Jack Dennis from MIT discussed the merits of a more general data communications network. Roger Scantlebury, a member of Donald Davies' team from the UK National Physical Laboratory, presented their research on packet switching in a high-speed computer network, and referenced the work of Paul Baran. At this seminal meeting, Scantlebury proposed packet switching for use in the ARPANET and persuaded Roberts the economics were favorable to message switching. The ARPA team enthusiastically received the idea and Roberts incorporated it into the ARPANET design.

In total, 29 conferences have been held, seven of which were outside the USA. The first conference held outside the USA was in Saint-Malo, France in 1997. Other countries to have hosted the conference are Canada, the UK, Portugal, China and Germany.

List of conferences
From 1967 to 2023, the conferences were held every two years, with the first SOSP conference taking place in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Beginning in 2024, SOSP the conference is held every year.