Athena
Athena is MIT's UNIX-based campus-wide academic computing facility.
The Athena system provides computing resources to over 14,000 users
across the MIT campus. Athena users have access to software to help
them write papers, create graphs, analyze data, communicate with
their colleagues, play games, and perform countless other tasks,
as well as software designed specifically for classwork.
Project Athena was created through a partnership of MIT with Digital Equipment Corporation
(DEC) and IBM to create a new generation of campus wide client-server based distributed
computing facilities.
The project is best known for its creation of new client-server software technology,
including the X-Window System, Kerberos authentication softare and many other system
and application level programs.
Steve Lerman directed the project for the first five years.
Also See...
(Champine, 1991).
"MIT Project Athena: A Model for Distributed Campus Computing," Digital Press.
(Arfman & Roden, 1992).
"Project Athena: Supporting Distributed Computing at MIT," IBM Systems Journal, 31 (3).
Led to the eventual development of the AthenaMuse
multimedia authoring language and corresponding consortium.
1993 Version (Hopper, 1993)
Athena is a campus-wide networked computer system serving the needs of MIT's
academic community. Rather than having a single computing center, Athena has
over 600 publicly-accessible workstations distributed around campus in both
public and departmental clusters where students and faculty can go 24 hours
a day, 365 days a year to do classwork, write papers, do personal work, and
even play games. Athena provides a bridge between the two familiar extremes
of stand-alone personal computers and timesharing machines. Each Athena user
has a dedicated, powerful multitasking computer at his or her disposal.
And each Athena workstation is connected to MITnet, the campus-wide computer
network, so users can access a number of shared services that would normally
be available only on a central facility. Athena is structured so that a
student may sit down at any Athena workstation on campus, and have access
to his or her own customized environment and personal files.
These files, as well as the software applications, are located on file servers
which are scattered throughout the campus, but appear to be located on the local
workstation once the user has logged in. Users don't need to bring any disks with
software or data files with them to the clusters--Athena provides what they need
over the network.
Hardware: Athena ran on DEC VS-2, VS-2000 and VS-3200 running ULTRIX or
4.3 BSC UNIX with X-Windows System Version 11 and IBM RT/PC or IBM 6152 with
ACIS UNIX operating system and X-Windows System Version 11. Sun 3 and Apollo
with Domain -OS and X11 Windows.