Except that's not what I said at all. I said:

"It's not a hard to find fact, your just not sufficiently interested in finding it."

The internet is littered with well known technology sites, all containing articles about whose bought what and what people think MS and Google are up to with their long term server plans.

Major internet outfits have in fact thousands of physical machines, on a scale far larger than your University IT department could possibly imagine. Although not your Computer Science department, because it's their job to know about these things! They also try and sum the power of their machines in clever ways, so they don't waste a drop of resources...

But the principle is the same as your university internet services! Since your on the user rather than administrator side of the university network divide, I doubt you've had much exposure to their internet serving gubbins, although they might co-exist on the same physical network!

I only have two books by the way!