Comment by theoldgit

when I was programming in the 70s and 80s (in the UK), the term systems programmer applied to those people involved in the configuration, tuning, management of software such as CICS, MVS, and their equivalents on other hardware bases. I worked at Sperry Univac for several years and the "systems programmers" were the engineers who tweaked the OS, the TP schedulers, built the product installation scripts, designed the configs that controlled the software. It was a specific tradecraft suited to those who were more technically focused, remember that COBOL was the prevalent language for nearly all programming roles in the 70s and that there was no "web" per se. The term started to fade away roughly when PCs started entering into mainstream computing