A History of Oxford University Computing Services (2008)

> 1994 In September a Digital Alpha 2100 server with four processors and 1 gigabyte of memory (known as sable) was installed to replace black as the University's general-purpose Unix server.

> 1996 In June a second Digital Alpha server was installed (known as ermine). This was bought because the load on sable was much greater than had been envisaged.

I remember those. They ran OSF/1. At the time i arrived, sable was for staff and graduate students, and ermine was for undergraduates. In the few years i was there, demand for shell accounts declined to much that they retired ermine, and moved the undergraduates over to sable.

(i might have the two machines the wrong way round)

Around this time, OUCS also operated a modem pool, so users could dial in from their homes over the PSTN. The UK national phone network is mostly run by BT, but there could also be other operators who sort of federated with BT. In Oxford, there was NTL, and the OUCS modem pool was on NTL. I had a BT phone, and OUCS being on NTL made no difference. But i knew some guys in a nerd house who had NTL phone service, and it turned out NTL offered free local calls to other NTL phones. So they just had a modem connection to OUCS running 24/7, connected to a machine on their house network configured as a router. That was the first time i came across always-on internet at home; it seemed scandalously radical.

(i might have misremembered the name of the phone company)

Sadly around the time this history comes to an end OUCS (now IT Services) abandoned much of its work with bespoke open source development to become the Microsoft money funnel it is now. I say "sadly" not just out of a preference for free software: the way in which this was done deeply affected the mental health of some of the staff involved.

Yeah, a lot of UK universities seem to have gone this route (the number who pay huge sums of money to use the atrocious Blackboard software is scandalous). I think they got burnt by their old-school proprietary software being outcompeted by modern software practices in the private sector. But what they really ought to do is create a non-profit collective that is shared between all (or tens of - you wouldn't need that many to make it a huge saving) universities in the UK to write the software they need for them.