SIPB was founded in 1969 by Bob Frankston, Gary Gut, David Burmaster, and Ed Fox.
Through an arrangement with the MIT administration, SIPB administered student accounts on university-owned computers.
[3] In 1983, MIT launched Project Athena, an initiative to create a distributed computing system for educational use.
[4] Project Athena led to several important Unix technologies such as X11, instant messaging, and network filesystems.
SIPB has been instrumental for funding technical software projects that benefit the MIT community.