Project Athena

It works as software (currently a set of Debian packages)[2] that makes a machine a thin client, that will download educational applications from the MIT servers on demand.

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.

Students were required to learn FORTRAN and Lisp,[4] and would have access to 3M computers, capable of 1 million instructions per second and with 1 megabyte of RAM and a 1 megapixel display.

[1] As of November 1988[update] MIT had 722 workstations in 33 private and public clusters on and off campus, including student living groups and fraternities.

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.

Athena was designed to minimize the use of labor in its operation, in part through the use of (what is now called ) "thin client" architecture and standard desktop configurations.

This not only reduces labor content in operations but also minimizes the amount of training for deployment, software upgrade, and trouble-shooting.

In addition, most dormitories have "quick login" kiosks, which is a standup workstation with a timer to limit access to ten minutes.

Originally, the Athena release used Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) as the base operating system for all hardware platforms.

Linux-Athena was introduced in version 9, with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system running on cheaper x86 or x86-64 hardware.

Athena 9 also replaced the internally developed "DASH" menu system and Motif Window Manager (mwm) with a more modern GNOME desktop.

Faculty expect that their students have access to, and know how to use, these applications for projects, and homework assignments, and some have used the MATLAB platform to rebuild the courseware that they had originally built using the X Window System.

Consequently, Athena made very significant contributions to the technology of distributed computing, but as a side-effect to solving an educational problem.

Digital Equipment Corporation, having implemented Athena at various beta-test sites,[18] "productized" the software as DECAthena to make it more portable, and offered it along with support services to the market.

Subsequently, the Windows NT network operating system from Microsoft incorporates Kerberos and several other basic architecture design features first implemented by Athena.