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).