19 Sep
2017
19 Sep
'17
9:40 p.m.
On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 11:16 AM, Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Wasn't the original project called "Athena", and wasn't it pursued
by
one of the many Labs at MIT?
Greg - not quite right, although I can see how I might look that way from
the outside. The Athena project was MIT's reaction to the CMU Andrew
Project. I'll not bring the somewhat humorous history but basic question
asked was simple... assume CMU succeeded in building the proposed 3M
'SPICE' system for Andrew. MIT wanted to know: How would you deploy it?
Athena set out to figure that out...
It's interesting the two pieces of Athena that actually still live are X
and Kerberos where were developed as part of the Athena project. I
understand why Kerberos and much of that tech was needed if you were going
to deploy hundreds of computers. I don't remember the argument for
writing X - i.e. why it was needed, you'd have to ask Dan Geer (I've
forgotten).
FYI: In the case of Andrew, Mach and some of the AFS technology (and I've
heard some suggest it helped to move IBM into the doing RIOS which
eventually lead to Power/PC).
Clem