Educational Computing Environment
Athena continues in use today, providing a ubiquitous computing platform for education at MIT; plans are to continue its use indefinitely.
Athena was designed to minimize the use of labor in its operation, in part through the use of (what is now called ) "thin client" architecture and standard desktop configurations. This not only reduces labor content in operations but also minimizes the amount of training for deployment, software upgrade, and trouble-shooting. These features continue to be of considerable benefit today.
In keeping with its original intent, access to the Athena system has been greatly enlarged in the last several years. Whereas in 1991 much of the access was in public "clusters" (computer labs) in academic buildings, access has been extended to dormitories, fraternities and sororities, and independent living groups. All dormitories have officially supported Athena clusters. In addition, most dormitories have "quick login" kiosks, which is a standup workstation with a timer to limit access to ten minutes. The dormitories have "one port per pillow" Internet access.
Originally, the Athena release used Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) as the base operating system for all hardware platforms. By the mid 1990s, public clusters consisted of the Solaris operating system on SPARC hardware from Sun Microsystems, and the IRIX operating system on MIPS hardware from Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI). SGI hardware was dropped in anticipation of the end of IRIX production in 2006. Linux-Athena was introduced in version 9, with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system running on cheaper x86 or x86-64 hardware. Athena 9 also replaced the internally developed "DASH" menu system and Motif Window Manager (mwm) with a more modern GNOME desktop. Athena 10 is based on Ubuntu Linux (derived from Debian) only. Support for Solaris is expected to be dropped almost entirely.
Read more about this topic: Project Athena
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