Mastodawn

universities in the 1980s: writing the majority of internet standard RFCs and their implementations

universities now: moving away from Microsoft cloud is really hard okay? 🥺

@eloy There used to be just a CS / Engineering department. There was no university IT. So it was far easier to make decisions.

Now there has to be a uni-wide IT team, with business goals, compliance, etc, often competing for resources with department specific IT groups. That's not necessarily a problem but makes it much harder to build and deploy new stuff if it always needs approval from higher up.

The worst though is when individual departments IT get folded into to main uni IT, then it's impossible to trial any innovations.

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maswan Feb 18

@LonM
@eloy Hmm. That's not the case here, central IT is older than the CS dept (uni IT is where the applied math folks handed in their stacks of punch cards for programming classes, before they split out into CS and had computers of their own). They just used to be more focused on technical expertise and innovation rather than process management and billing.

The CS and/or HPC dept running their own infra still happens, but is under political and financial pressure.