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, 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 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, 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, Kerberos, and Zephyr Notification Service. 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. In 1979 Dertouzos proposed to university president Jerome Wiesner that the university network mainframe computers for student use. At that time MIT used computers throughout its research, but undergraduates did not use computers except in Course VI (computer science) classes. With no interest from the rest of the university, the School of Engineering in 1982 approached DEC for equipment for itself. President Paul E. Gray and the MIT Corporation wanted the project to benefit the rest of the university, and IBM agreed to donate equipment to MIT except to the engineering school. Project Athena began in May 1983. Its initial goals were to: 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. Although IBM and DEC computers were incompatible, Athena's designers intended that software would run similarly on both. MIT did not want to be dependent on one vendor at the end of Athena. Sixty-three DEC VAX-11/750 servers were the first timesharing clusters. 'Phase II' began in September 1987, with hundreds of IBM RT PC workstations replacing the VAXes, which became fileservers for the workstations. The DEC-IBM division between departments no longer existed. Upon logging into a workstation, students 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. The project spawned many technologies that are widely used today, such as the X Window System and Kerberos. Among the other technologies developed for Project Athena were the Zephyr Notification Service and the Hesiod name and directory service. As of November 1988 MIT had 722 workstations in 33 private and public clusters on and off campus, including student living groups and fraternities. A survey found that 92% of undergraduates had used the Athena workstations at least once, and 25% used them every day. The project received an extension of three years in January 1988. Developers who had focused on creating the operating system and courseware for various educational subjects now worked to improve Athena's stability and make it more user friendly. When Project Athena ended in June 1991, MIT's IT department took it over and extended it into the university's research and administrative divisions. As of April 1999 the MIT campus had more than 1300 Athena workstations, and more than 6000 Athena users logged into the system daily. Athena is still used by many in the MIT community through the computer labs scattered around the campus. It is also now available for installation on personal computers, including laptops.