Project Athena

Project Athena was joint project of MIT, Digital Equipment Corporation, and IBM which sought to provide easy access to computing resources for all MIT students.

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 used by Athena.