[TUHS] project athena (was Re: Setting up an X Development Environment for Mac OS)

[Henry Mensch]

that would have happened before I arrived in April of 1986. my first job at Athena was to. get folks off those XTs and (mostly) ATs.

This was wildly unsuccessful and unpopular because the replacement hardware wouldn't be similarly capable... and also because, even then, there were more things that could be plugged into XTs and ATs. The old platform was perceived as more versatile.

- Henry

On February 9, 2023 20:30:47 "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso at mit.edu> wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 09, 2023 at 09:12:28AM +1100, Jonathan Gray wrote:
>>
>> Before the PC/RT machines and AOS, there was also an attempt at PC/XT
>> machines with Genix running on a add-in card.
>
> It's possible that there were some IBM'ers at MIT Building E40 (where
> Project Athena was headquartered) that were playing with a PC/XT with
> a co-processor board, but as far as I know that was never deployed in
> the field --- at least, I never saw them.  The only I saw were PC/AT's
> (that is, the ones with the '286 CPU) that ran DOS and which were
> essentially used only to telnet to the Vax 750's (or supdup to the MIT
> AI / LCS lab machines, but most undergraduates didn't have access to
> those computers; connecting to MIT Multics was also possible, via a
> 3270 emulator, but again, most undergrduates didn't have access,
> although MIT's Student Information Processing Board could give out
> limited accounts for undergraduates to experiment with Multics.)
>
> 		     		       		  - Ted