Each department had a person service their internal or external client. The could provide the service the old slow way or our way. EG You ask the Tech Pub dept

Each department had a person service their internal or external client. The could provide the service the old slow way or our way. EG You ask the Tech Pub dept for the 5000 page Word perfect documents and wait a month to get it printed and shipped through formal channels. Or a couple of days through our team to have it on a secure download location on our public server. Marketing, New Business, Sales and Engineering each had a rep. If you want a Schematic out of engineering, several weeks until it was plotted or a day or two to get the right Autocad or Bentley Microstation cad file into the secure down load. I was the goto guy if you needed data off our Mainframe. It was a massive data sink but it was hard to get anything out. Web dev let me turn the MF into a FTP server were I could pull data down to the Web servers. Web application were written for each need. Oh if you did have your own departmental server I would ask H/W services to get me some old PC hardware and have a machine up and ask the Computer center to host it. None of this had official sanction. Expectations were low as the competition were Green screen MF program. The problem was there was 3 to 5 year waiting list for new MF projects. I could do new apps in a week. It was written prototype level code with no expectation of maintaining it. One subcontract tracking app stayed up for 7 years (3 years after I left). The alternative was to talk to someone who got a monthly 1000 page printout and manual marked up the updates that were being sent to Daily Data Entry. I download the big monthly output once and each Daily update and merged them. Probably less the 50 lines of Perl. Set up a Perl backed web page the searched the file and display matching records.