Apple Users

I supported a department that got a grant of Sun computers with very little memory and a server with very little disk space. But it got a lot of work done. Mostly grad students, postdocs and professors. I got to be pretty genius at trimming and sharing file system bits off thr server and configuring third party SCSI disks. The staff Apple computers and the Suns shared a lot of technology, like SCSI.

I did as many repairs as I could, but the gear got older, and I asked for some money to upgrade the server. When that was denied, I figured the end was near. So, I started job hunting. The computers were free and I was the only cost, so that ended and support was farmed out to the Dean’s Office staff, multiplexing them, I guess.

Budget covered staff equipment and grants covered the rest. We had early linux adopters, of course, in the grad and postdoc population.

It was a treat being around many Nobel laureates. (Gives away the name of the university) even if my budget was roughly zero and I had to scrounge. I was only hacked by the C.S. Department, who exploited the sendmail program for fun (and probably for homework) So I had to upgrade that in place. Eric Allman, who wrote the sendmail program, was on campus at the time. Later, when he started his own company, I almost got a job there. It involved some marketing, and I had no experience. (Later, I got a job with Sun as the engineer half of a sales team. Life is weird, to say the least.). White-hat cracking passwords was eye-opening. I just send out notices.

Interesting aspect was that the staff data was property of the U (Just ask asshole John Eastman about that aspect of universities) whereas academics had complete freedom, with one exception, Someone made a threat via email so that had to be dredged up. The department accountant was found to be embezzling, so the women in the front office asked me to hang around in case he got violent when he was escorted out. My brawn was not needed, fortunately. He left peacefully, and I quit peacefully after the money ran out for my services.

One of the math department profs lost some parts of his fingers due to Terrible Ted, so we were on the alert, and all snail mail was checked.

One of our profs had a NeXT, but I never dealt with it. If someone blew up the network (usually on a Friday afternoon), I got the campus networking department to help. Fortunately for me, they set and maintained the rules, so I didn’t have to take heat from researchers who wanted to hang anything and everything on the network as they pleased.