Project Athena as a distributed computer system

Author

Champine, George A. ; Geer, Daniel E., Jr. ; Ruh, William N.

Author_Institution

Digital Equipment Corp., Maynard, MA, USA

Volume

23

Issue

9

fYear

1990

Firstpage

40

Lastpage

51

Abstract

Project Athena, established in 1983 to improve the quality of education at MIT (Massachussetts Institute of Technology) by providing campuswide, high-quality computing based on a large network of workstations, is discussed, focusing on the design of Athena´s distributed workstation system. The requirements of the system are outlined distributed system models are reviewed, other distributed operating systems are described, and issues in distributed systems are examined. The distributed-system model for Athena is discussed. Athena has three major components; workstations a network, and servers. The approach taken by the Athena developers was to implement a set of network services to replace equivalent time-sharing services, in essence converting the time-sharing Unix model into a distributed operating system.<>

Keywords

educational administrative data processing; local area networks; network operating systems; MIT; Project Athena; distributed computer system; distributed operating systems; distributed system models; distributed workstation system; education; network services; servers; Computer networks; Displays; Distributed computing; File servers; File systems; Network servers; Page description languages; Production systems; Time sharing computer systems; Workstations;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Computer

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9162

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/2.58217

Filename

58217