A long time ago, in an OSU department far far away, I wrote a console server for my boss, Steve Romig. We thought it was neat so we presented a paper at LISA IV, in Colorado Springs, in 1990. At the time we couldn't find any precedents.
Purdue took our copy of the console server and "ran with it" (made many more modifications and provided more support). They claimed it was their own, and they had originated it. Oops.
It turns out that when we wrote ours, Purdue already had one, although I believe it was written for mainframes, not UNIX boxes. They thought that our code was based on that, but it wasn't because we weren't aware of it. So Purdue did write the first one (that I'm aware of).