Project Athena - Definition and Overview

Project Athena was joint project of MIT, Digital Equipment Corporation, and IBM. It was launched in 1983, and ran through June 30, 1991, eight years after it began. The goals were to create a computing environment that would scale up to 10,000 workstations and accommodate heterogeneous hardware, but yet be "coherent". This concept means that a user could go to any workstation and access any files or applications without finding major differences in the user interface and service delivery.

The project spawned many technologies that are widely used today, such as Kerberos and the X Window System. Amongst the other technologies developed for Project Athena were the Zephyr Notification Service, the first Instant Messaging service, and the Hesiod name and directory service.

The X Window System originated as a joint project of Project Athena and MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, and is used by Athena.