The Information Technology Center, a partnership of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), began work on the Andrew Project in 1982.
[1] 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 initial hardware deployment in 1985 established a number of university-owned "clusters" of public workstations in various academic buildings and dormitories.
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.
Mostly rewritten as a result of experience from early deployments, Andrew had four major software components: AFS moved out of the Information Technology Center to Transarc in 1988.
AUIS is a set of tools that allows users to create and distribute documents containing a variety of formatted and embedded objects.