Starlink Project

Until the late 1990s, it also supplied computing hardware and system administration personnel to UK astronomical institutes.

In 2006, the Joint Astronomy Centre released its own updated version of Starlink and took over maintenance; the task was passed again in mid-2015 to the East Asian Observatory.

The project provided centrally-purchased (and thus discounted) hardware, professional system administrators, and the developers to write astronomical data-reduction applications for the UK astronomy community and beyond.

By 1982, the project had a staff of 17, serving about 400 users at six sites, using seven VAXen (six VAX-11/780s and one VAX-11/750, representing a total of about 6.5 GB of disk space).

[citation needed] At present, though funding for the project has ceased, the software is still available, either as pre-built distributions, or from a Git repository.