Evi Nemeth
1940 – 2013 · engineer, sailor, author, mentor
// tribute
Engineer, sailor, author of the legendary Unix System Administration Handbook, and mentor to generations of system and network administrators. Evi had a rare gift: she could make the deepest technical truths feel obvious, and she never lost sight of the humans and institutions the technology served.
Her nine-layer extension of the OSI model — adding the Financial and Political layers above the familiar seven — was printed on a t-shirt that became legend among network operators. Semi-facetious and entirely serious, it captured a truth we build on every day: no analysis of Internet technology is complete without the financial and political context it operates in. The design lives on in legal scholarship and, thanks to the Internet Systems Consortium,on the shirt itself.
She was lost at sea in 2013 aboard the schooner Nina, doing what she loved. This company carries her layer forward.
