Athena Retrospective Symposium - January 20, 1999

On January 20 we celebrated the 15th anniversary of the start of Project Athena with an all-day symposium. The day served as a reunion for staff who worked on Athena at some point since its start in 1983; a chance to look back at successes and disappointments; and an opportunity to look ahead to what the academic computing environment at MIT might be like five, ten, and even fifteen years from now.

The day consisted of four panels, an introduction by Greg Jackson, former Director of Academic Computing at MIT, and a look back at the original vision and early history of Athena by Prof. Joel Moses. Panelists included current and former Directors of Athena and of Academic Computing, MIT faculty and staff, and representatives from Athena's vendor partners.

The panels discussed the following topics, which are listed with links to some short video excerpts of the discussions (more video links to follow as we continue to digitize them):

  1. Has Athena transformed eduation and the student experience at MIT?(Alicia Allen, Ed Barrett, Joe Ferreira, Greg Rutledge, Bruce Tidor, Tom Weiss)

  2. The impact of Athena on the technology marketplace: Athena as the birth of the networked computer (Josina Arfman, Dan Geer, Jim Gettys, Jack McCredie, Jerry Saltzer)

  3. Building applications for education: Putting the icing on the cake(John Belcher, Bill Cattey, Anne LaVin, Janet Murray, Seth Teller)

  4. Focusing on the future: Where do we go from here?(Greg Jackson, Vijay Kumar, Steve Lerman, Bill Mitchell)

    See also this link to an online collection of Athena memorabilia

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    Last updated 4/12/99