Student Information Processing Board

The Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) is a student group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that helps students access computing resources and use them effectively. When it was founded in 1969 by Bob Frankston, computers in universities were still expensive resources reserved for funded research projects. Through an arrangement with the MIT administration, SIPB administered student accounts on university-owned computers.

SIPB was instrumental in the creation of Project Athena, a campuswide computing project which led to several important Unix technologies such as X11, , and network filesystems.

SIPB set up a Web server at www.mit.edu in 1993, when the number of public web servers was roughly 100 and long before university Web sites became common. When MIT finally did set up an official Web site, it was at web.mit.edu.

In addition to being MIT's oldest computing society, SIPB has been instrumental for funding technical software projects that benefit the MIT community including scripts.mit.edu, BarnOwl, and Debathena.

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