wow, I'm also surprised to see my alma mater on the front of Hacker News. I actually worked at Columbia AcIS from 1996- for quite a while (and now live in the

wow, I'm also surprised to see my alma mater on the front of Hacker News. I actually worked at Columbia AcIS from 1996- for quite a while (and now live in the area, posting this from the Hungarian Pastry Shop). I'd say most of the historic stuff was before my time, but being there in the 90s definitely had its moments. Frank's history is a little biased since he worked embedded in AcIS and developed Kermit software -- obviously that's fair, since it's his history! Some interesting (though possibly a little too inside-baseball-y) addendums that he doesn't mention: * The Electrical Engineering department had installed Ethernet itself very early. So when everything else was wired, there was a period of time when the EE department had the slowest and worst Ethernet capabilities since it was so old. * One of the people that worked right next to Frank's office was also a volunteer fireman. On 9/11/01, he rushed down to help at the World Trade Center site, and ended up helping to establish wireless networking and other communications on the ground, since he found a lot of the police/fire department were unable to communicate with antennas down, etc. * Before web mail, students and faculty logged in to 'CUNIX' the Columbia unix timeshare to use Pine (or whatever program, etc you wanted). Way after the transition, Cunix still had a lot of people logging in and using unix to manage their ~username web accounts and, yes, continue to use Pine (which was so much better :-) * I remember the day that we hit 65536 Columbia affiliates and our login system was down for a while, as people realized (and then fixed) the problem. * The lore was that AcIS (Academic Information Systems) split-off/was born from a cantankerous English professor that was upset that central IT wasn't doing anything for faculty -- that ended up being the organization that provided Email and Internet connectivity along with most other services for Columbia students and faculty. * He alludes to funding/reputations between AcIS and AIS. AIS was allowed to bill departments for their services, and provided services only to departments that could afford it. AcIS got central funding but then budgets directly protracted what was possible. An interesting early lesson for me in business models! * Columbia was especially decentralized. Frank's story is mostly from the perspective of central university IT. The medical campus, business school, law school and many other departments all had their own IT departments that did varying amounts of services. * Frank doesn't tell the story of computing in education at Columbia. Mike Crow (who now makes headlines as the President of Arizona State University) was Provost and during the 90's tech boom funded several organizations that were going to "make millions in online education." Many of the first attempts at proto-MOOCs were through organizations like EPIC (publishing), 'Digital Knowledge Ventures,' Fathom, and the Center for New Media Teaching and Learning. All but the latter lost funding after a few years after being unable to profit. Was it an idea that was too early for its time? In some ways, a big reason that Columbia is behind other places wrt MOOCs is because the organization was burnt out from those previous investments. Anyway, a lot of the folks there introduced me to things like Emacs and all the obscure unix commands. Thanks to all of them.