Andrew Project - History

History

The Information Technology Center, a partnership of Carnegie Mellon and IBM, began work on the Andrew Project in 1982. 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 proposed "3M computer" workstations included a million pixel display and a megabyte of memory, running at a million instructions per second. Unfortunately a fourth M, cost on the order of a megapenny (US$10,000), made the computers beyond the reach of students' budgets. The initial hardware deployment in 1985 established a number of university-owned "clusters" of public workstations in various academic buildings and dormitories. The campus was fully wired and ready for the eventual availability of inexpensive personal computers.

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.

Initially the system was prototyped on Sun Microsystems machines, and then to IBM 6150 RT series computers running a special IBM Academic Operating System. People involved in the project included James H. Morris, Nathaniel Borenstein, James Gosling and David S. H. Rosenthal.

The project was extended several times after 1985 in order to complete the software, and was renamed "Andrew" for Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon, the founders of the institutions that eventually became Carnegie Mellon University. Mostly rewritten as a result of experience from early deployments, Andrew had four major software components:

• The Andrew Toolkit (ATK), a set of tools that allows users to create and distribute documents containing a variety of formatted and embedded objects,
• The Andrew Messaging System (AMS), an email and bulletin board system based on ATK, and
• The Andrew File System (AFS), a distributed file system emphasizing scalability for an academic and research environment.
• The Andrew window manager (WM), a tiled (non-overlapping windows) window system which allowed remote display of windows on a workstation display. It was one of the first network-oriented window managers to run on Unix as a graphical display. As part of the CMU's partnership with IBM, IBM retained the licensing rights to WM. WM was meant to be licensed under reasonable terms, which CMU thought would resemble a relatively cheap UNIX license, while IBM sought a more lucrative licensing scheme. WM was later replaced by X11 from MIT. Its developers, Gosling and Rosenthal, would next develop the NeWS (Network extensible Window System).

AFS moved out of the Information Technology Center to Transarc in 1988. AMS was fully decommissioned and replaced with the Cyrus IMAP server in 2002.