​As President of USENIX during that choice, that is a legacy I am particularly proud.  It was a bit of a scary thing to do and so far ACM and IEEE have been loath to follow suite as completely (I suspect because the digital library is (was) a significant source of revenue for all three organizations).  [To be fair, there are some exceptions, I believe ACM Queue is downloadable - although I note that it is interesting a lot of people working on Queue are also USENIX folks some of whom may be lurking on this mailing list].  

For what ever its worth, just a month or so ago, I was very pleased to see my now Sr in college CS major daughter  -- who went to her first USENIX conference in 1993 in stroller -- just joined USENIX (maybe its a little like joining "the party").  But if USENIX is to continue their tradition of being open and freely accessible, I offer an unabashed advertisement (i.e no pay walls): like her and her college peers, please consider a USENIX membership and/or going to a conference or two. 

To Doug's question -- I agree that the answers about "Computing Systems" that have been given are pretty much to the mark.   It was not an insignificant undertaking to publish such a journal; and keeping it/dropping was a trade off.

To all on the list, I can say that the Board has toyed with bring it back a couple of times when I was on it.   If any of you have thoughts on the matter, send them to the current Board of Directors ( bod@usenix.org ) and/or the Executive Director:  Casey Henderson (execdir@usenix.org).