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Comment by grahamlee | Hacker News Reader

It was ntl (styled as ntl:). Like your nerd house friends I had ntl in my house on the Cowley Road, and they offered a dual-line service so we had one line connected to the modem pool full-time (my SuSE Linux desktop ran an RFC1918 network for the other computers in the house).

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.

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> 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.

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.

I have friends who were in IT at UCL, and yes, it sounds horrifying. All the people who actually knew how to do things for users are gone, and there are hundreds of managers who can't and won't do anything instead.

I'm not sure it was a rational decision based on experiences with proprietary software. It sounds like good old grift to me.

It's not that I disagree with you exactly, but as someone who teaches at a UK university (much less prestigious than Oxford or UCL)... I used to complain a lot about how much money we were sending to Microsoft and Blackboard etc, but then someone pointed to me that the main non-outsourced piece of software we use (the main student records/teaching info system) is borderline unusuable. Horribly slow, lots of 90s errors like commas in course names breaking things, doesn't work on a tablet, etc etc. At least the Microsoft stuff works.

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