In conversation with dad last night regarding his work at UCLIC on Bring Your Own Device (click on that link if you are interested – volunteers still required) I had a moment of revelation… I was running a BYOD service at scale back in 1995.
To be fair, it wasn’t called that at the time. And to be even more fair, it wasn’t a particularly great service… but Bring Your Own Device was the de facto method of IT service provision for students at the London School of Economics when I worked there managing IT support for six of the academic departments back in the mid-1990s.
Alongside computer rooms where PCs and Macs were provided en masse (except when thieves stole the RAM from them – remember those days when 16Mb was worth over £100?!), students who wanted to use IT services were almost positively encouraged to bring their own devices.
It would be interesting to know how academic institutions are handling the phenomenon these days given that they have been in the BYOD for such a long time. I know that support for things like network access in Higher Education establishments in the UK via Janet is pretty advanced (Android apps for WiFi access for example). There is much to be learned…
mmitII 