I joined the UK Mirror Service at Lancaster University when it was known as the National Public Domain Software Archive (NPDSA). Subsequently it had a name change to HENSA/micros (the Higher Education National Software Archive) when we joined forces with another similarly funded body in Kent which came to be known as HENSA/Unix. Eventually we became organisationally merged tegether to become just HENSA then we changed the name to The UK Mirror Service.
I originally joined NPDSA as Technical Manager performing mostly systems administration tasks, although I did have one member of staff under me. For example, my first task was to remove the now redundent X.25 networking from our Sun server - both the software drivers and the physical hardware. JaNET was just starting to join the internet revolution at that point.
I developed the web systems which we used for HENSA/micros - we were using Gopher when I started. Both the ability to browse and search the collections were two major projects I took on. I wrote the cgi systems in C on Solaris for HENSA/micros.
When we merged with Kent to become HENSA I redeveloped the front end systems in line with the new archive contents and style and the Kent people took on most of the behind-the-scenes systems. I created the file browser inteface and started work on developing search services and was placed in charge of a student intern.
In 2004, the funding body (JISC) decided to provide the service through a Strategic Partner rather that through Lancaster and Kent universities and I became redeployed within the university.
The UK Mirror Service lives on at mirrorservice.org thatks to the efforts of the people at Kent. Their computing department runs the Mirror Service and the software and systems are maintained during what little spare time the staff have. Funnily enough, as I write this I notice that they are still using my browser interface to access the files.