Andrew Project

The Andrew Project was a distributed computing environment developed at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) beginning in 1982. It was an ambitious project for its time and resulted in an unprecedentedly vast and accessible university computing infrastructure.

The Information Technology Center, a partnership of Carnegie Mellon and IBM, began work on the Andrew Project in 1982. In its initial phase, the project involved both software and hardware, including wiring the campus for data and developing workstations to be distributed to students and faculty at CMU and elsewhere. The proposed "3M computer" workstations included a million pixel display and a megabyte of memory, running at a million instructions per second. Unfortunately a fourth M, cost on the order of a (US$10,000), made the computers beyond the reach of students' budgets. The initial hardware deployment in 1985 established a number of university-owned "clusters" of public workstations in various academic buildings and dormitories. The campus was fully wired and ready for the eventual availability of inexpensive personal computers.

Early development within the Information Technology Center, originally called VICE (Vast Integrated Computing Environment) and VIRTUE (Virtue Is Reached Through Unix and Emacs), focused on centralized tools, such as a file server, and workstation tools including a window manager, editor, email, and file system client code.

Initially the system was prototyped on Sun Microsystems machines, and then to IBM 6150 RT series computers running a special IBM Academic Operating System. People involved in the project included James H. Morris, Nathaniel Borenstein, James Gosling, and David S. H. Rosenthal.

The project was extended several times after 1985 in order to complete the software, and was renamed "Andrew" for Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon, the founders of the institutions that eventually became Carnegie Mellon University. Mostly rewritten as a result of experience from early deployments, Andrew had four major software components:

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