Project Athena was a joint project of MIT, Digital Equipment Corporation, and IBM to produce a campus-wide distributed computing environment for educational use.[1] It was launched in 1983, and research and development ran until June 30, 1991. As of 2023[update], Athena is still in production use at MIT. 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.
Project Athena was important in the early history of desktop and distributed computing. It created the X Window System, Kerberos, and Zephyr Notification Service.[1] It influenced the development of thin computing, LDAP, Active Directory, and instant messaging.
- ^ a b Steiner, Jennifer G.; Geer, Daniel E. Jr. (21 July 1988). "Network Services in the Athena Environment". Proceedings of the Winter 1988 Usenix Conference. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.31.8727.
- ^ "What are the hardware requirements for installing Debathena? - IS&T Contributions - Hermes". mit.edu.