when I started my doctoral fellowship. I don't think it had all it's "stuff" because I never did get it to work right. I ended up buying a new PC for home and taking my old PC to work. My department, within the flagship university of the state, was too cheap to provide decent PCs for doc students. I am still a bit bitter about that. At least they covered my tuition and fees and gave me a stipend. The department chair was later forced to resign over financial "irregularities" in the department. Screw that guy.

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.

I expect that if I had more tech savvy I might have had better luck with the Next. Being a new doctoral student, I didn't have much time to improvise.

Some grad students are making news now.

A handful of grad students are pretty advanced computer geeks, and there’s a saying that for every admin, there’s someone who knows one or two things better than you do, so I got some help from my customers.

(I was not in the CS department. Physics, actually)

But most grad students were more than full time busy with courses and research projects. A good mix of theoretical and experimental people.

NeXT had a small community, so help was probably a bit hard to come by at the time. Usenet was the thing.

I got a bachelors in physics and started grad school but there was that war. So by the time I got out of the service, I wasn’t eager to go back to school, and got into aerospace and eventually into computers, in various ratios, becoming 100%. Aerospace was up and down, and those h stuck with it had built networks within.

Not at all like I had imagined, but I do suspect that an academic career was not suited for me, or I’d have gone back as a student, rather than a staff person.

Hope things worked out well for you. I had some fun (and some crazy times)