Project Athena

Project Athena was a joint project of MIT, Digital Equipment Corporation, and IBM to produce a campus-wide distributed computing environment for educational use. It was launched in 1983, and research and development ran until June 30, 1991, eight years after it began. , Athena is still in production use at MIT. It works as software (currently a set of Debian packages) that makes a machine a thin client, that will download educational applications from the MIT servers on demand.