Short for system administrator
SystemsAdministration is what a
SysAdmin does.
The term
SysAdmin was first used on Multics
It was a mainframe operating system for GE (later Honeywell) mainframes. It comes from the "project" name used
by system administrators.
The system administration software for Multics was written in about 1969, by Joseph F. Ossanna and Michael J. Spier. No one remembers now who coined the term or adopted the convention of
CamelCase. (The first Multics
SysAdmin other than test users was
TomVanVleck, then a member of the MIT research staff.)
The piece of the Multics system administration code that was responsible for logging in users, roughlyequivalent to Unix getty, is online.