Craig Brown, Technology Innovator, Retires after 44 Years

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Craig Brown will retire March 31, after 44 years of service to the University of Arkansas.

Craig Brown, associate CIO, has announced his retirement effective March 31, after serving 44 years at the University of Arkansas, primarily in Information Technology Services. A reception for Brown is scheduled from 2 to 3:30 p.m. Thursday, March 31, in ADSB 240. Cake and refreshments will be served.

Brown has served as a member of the IT Services leadership team for 25 years, and as an associate CIO the last four years. He earned a B.A. in math and an M.S. in computer science from the University of Arkansas. As a graduate student he worked on the help desk and in the Academic Computer Center as a computer operator. He started working full time for IT Services (then Computing Services) in 1974 as programmer, analyst and statistician. Brown was the first computing services research associate for a federally funded grant on the potential benefits of what became Emergency Medical Services (EMS).

In the 1970s Computing Services was focused around operating the mainframe, running card decks and helping people debug programs. "At that time, researchers had to be self-sufficient or find a grad student to do programming," Brown said. "Most computing was related to physics, chemistry, engineering or agriculture."

By the late '70s, Computing Services started offering programming support for researchers. "If researchers had ideas about using computers, but couldn't execute them," Brown said, "we would help. We couldn't keep up with demand."

In the late '70s and early '80s, a few faculty members also began working with Radio Shack, Commodore and Apple II microcomputers, and "we convinced the director of Computing Services that we needed to be familiar with microcomputers to be able to support them," Brown said.

Brown attended a workshop with David Merrifield (currently with ARE-ON) on creating interface cards so that microcomputers could collect data from lab equipment. Together they connected an Apple II Plus to the mainframe with Merrifield building the hardware and Brown writing the software. What they created was the first microcomputer communication environment on campus—a single microcomputer connected to the mainframe by a direct cable.

A few years later, Brown and Merrifield also teamed up to connect the University of Arkansas to the world. Bernard Madison, then chair of the Department of Mathematical Sciences, learned there was an opportunity for the university to join a regional consortium applying to the National Science Foundation to be part of a national research network called NSFnet. Madison enlisted the help of Dennis Brewer, then associate professor of mathematics, to compile research projects from around campus that might benefit from a connection to supercomputing resources through a national network. Brown and Brewer received an NFS grant, and Merrifield installed the router that established the connection.

"We justified the connection with research computing," Brewer said, "but the main application turned out to be something called 'email'."

"We spent a lot more time back then looking at emerging tools," Brown said. "You never really knew for sure in those days how we would end up using the technology. Now there's more of an emphasis on critical production systems, and I spend more time working with others to choose between available systems rather than inventing things we can do with new tools."

Whether he was innovating or working with others to implement systems, Brown always found the end results interesting—and sometimes unexpected. For example, Brown worked with the ad hoc committee that developed the first campus network design. They were also asked to make a funding recommendation, and one of the options was to fund it centrally.

"The feeling by upper administration at the time was that a network connection wasn't really necessary for most people," Brown said. "The response to central funding was 'if people didn't have to pay for a network connection, then everyone would unnecessarily want one.' Of course, today we can't imagine not being able to connect to the network."

Building out the original core campus network required special funding approved by then-Chancellor Daniel Ferritor. "After the first year, we had to go back and ask for more money," Brown said. "The chancellor remarked jokingly that 'this networking stuff is a financial black hole.' He had no idea how right he was!"

Brown also co-created user services within Computing Services, centralized microcomputer support, worked with an ad hoc committee to establish the first distributed computer labs, and was the first statistician programmer and stat package coordinator for Computing Services.

Although Brown's work with technology made a direct impact on faculty, staff and students at the university, he was also part of a nationwide movement of technology innovators who put in place the infrastructure upon which the digital world we live in today—and take for granted—was built.

"The tech community was really open in the early days," Brown said. "Universities shared and collaborated, which allowed us to learn a lot from one another." Brown reminisced about going out for drinks at a networking and user conference in Nebraska, for example, when the conversation turned to using Gopher and FTP to search for information. At that time, the World Wide Web did not exist and it was quite novel to seek information over a network.

"While we were talking about online information sharing," Brown said, "a professor and one of his students described something new they were working on. That something eventually became the Web browsers we know today. In fact, I believe the student went on to do early development at Netscape."

Brown spent six years of his early career with the university in Business Affairs as the data processing procurement officer responsible for evaluating and approving all computing-related purchase requests. While in that role, Brown acquired and implemented the first automated purchasing system and was a member of a team that developed the functional requirements for what would become BASIS.

When Brown returned to Computing Services, he managed the campus network engineering unit, the IT Services Novell file server group and the Microsoft server group. An Arkansas Academy of Computing charter member, Brown was awarded Network World's Enterprise All-Star Award in 2005 for his work with wireless mesh technology and presented at EDUCAUSE and Nortel's Executive Briefing Center.  

"From the very beginning, I always felt like I had direct input and influence on the decisions made by the director of Computing Services and later IT Services," Brown said. "I had a lot of freedom at the university to work in different roles and develop technical solutions for a lot of different kinds of problems. I think what we accomplished with technology—especially in those early days when we were experimenting with the tools—was kind of amazing."