Project Athena was a joint project of MIT, Digital Equipment Corporation, and IBM to produce a campus-wide distributed computing environment for educational use. It was launched in 1983, and research and development ran until June 30, 1991, eight years after it began. As of 2012, Athena is still in production use at MIT. It works as software (currently a set of Ubuntu packages) 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. It influenced the development of thin computing, LDAP, Active Directory, and instant messaging.
Read more about Project Athena: Accidental Research, Overall History, Educational Computing Environment, Educational Software, Contributing To The Development of Distributed Systems, Use Outside MIT
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