Project Athena

Project Athena was a joint project of MIT, Digital Equipment Corporation, and IBM to produce a campus-wide distributed computing environment for educational use. It was launched in 1983, and research and development ran until June 30, 1991, eight years after it began. As of 2017^[update], Athena is still in production use at MIT. It works as software (currently a set of Debian packages) that makes a machine a thin client, that will download educational applications from the MIT servers on demand.

Project Athena was important in the early history of desktop and distributed computing. It created the X Window System, , and . It influenced the development of thin computing, LDAP, Active Directory, and instant messaging.

Leaders of the $50 million, five-year project at MIT included Michael Dertouzos, director of the Laboratory for Computer Science; Jerry Wilson, dean of the School of Engineering; and Joel Moses, head of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department. DEC agreed to contribute more than 300 terminals, 1600 microcomputers, 63 minicomputers, and five employees. IBM agreed to contribute 500 microcomputers, 500 workstations, software, five employees, and grant funding.

Project Athena began in May 1983. Its initial goals were to:

Although MIT already had many computers, they were mostly used for research and administration, not by students. The project intended to extend computer power into fields of study outside computer science and engineering, such as foreign languages, economics, and political science. To implement these goals, MIT decided to build a Unix-based distributed computing system. Unlike those at Carnegie Mellon University, which also received the IBM and DEC grants, students did not have to own their own computer; MIT built computer labs for their users, although the goal was to put networked computers into each dormitory. Students were required to learn FORTRAN and Lisp, and would have access to sophisticated graphical workstations, capable of 1 million instructions per second and with 1 megabyte of RAM and a 1 megapixel display. Upon logging into a workstation, they would have immediate access to a universal set of files and programs via central services. Because the workstation used a thin client model, the user interface would be consistent despite the use of different hardware vendors for different workstations. A small staff could maintain hundreds of clients.

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