Lessons from Project Athena

Professor Jerome H. Saltzer
Technical Director, M.I.T. Project Athena


ABSTRACT

Project Athena's primary goal is to improve undergraduate education
at M.I.T. with the application of of networked engineering
workstations.  To this end, it has deployed 650 such workstations and
about 70 servers of various types in a networked client-server
architecture.  Five technical developments were required in order to
deploy this system:  a window system to hide otherwise incoherent
programming interfaces of bit-mapped displays, a network
authentication system to allow services to identify clients, a
network naming system to allow clients to locate services, a service
management system to minimize administrative effort, and substantial
rearrangements of Berkeley UNIX to adapt it to the networked
workstation environment and to minimize hand-tailoring.

As might be expected, quite a number of interesting problems were
encountered along the way: debates among proponents of personal
computers and proponents of engineering workstations; management of
deployment and operation at such a large scale, preparing our
institution to cope with a new technology, unrealistic expectations,
and fighting (or finessing) the traditions and perspectives of the
supplying industries.