"In 1983, the year Project Athena began, it was still possible for students to receive a science or engineering degree from MIT without ever having touched a co

"In 1983, the year Project Athena began, it was still possible for students to receive a science or engineering degree from MIT without ever having touched a computer. That was despite digital computers having been on campus since 1947, when the Navy commissioned Whirlwind I, one of the world’s first real-time computers. (It was powered by vacuum tubes.) But at the time, computers were nearly all provided by research funds which restricted their use. Pre-Athena, MIT students who needed to use computers could work on computing systems such as CTSS. These systems did have some drawbacks, though. For one thing, students often had to wait in line at all hours of the day to do their work. In 1969, the Institute moved from CTSS to MULTICS, which was supported primarily by research funds with limited access for educational purposes. It included a timeshare aspect which meant that if students went over their allotted time, they weren’t allowed to run any more programs until the timeshare refreshed. “(Before Athena), there was no internet access or email, no way to share files, and no standard anything. There was no @mit.edu address,” says Earll Murman, the director of the latter half of the eight-year project. “Athena changed all of that.”"