MIT Project Athena Commemorative Video, 1991

Before the Internet and World Wide Web, before HTML, client-server or distributed computing, or public key encryption... there was MIT's Project Athena.

Project Athena was an eight-year (1983–1991), $100 million collaborative project involving MIT, IBM, and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) to invent distributed computing, and integrate computers into the university curriculum at MIT and beyond. The project stimulated many influential applications, such as Kerberos (public key encryption), Instant Messaging, Active Directory, and the X Window System.

This video was created at the end of the project, to explain and showcase both the technical and educational successes. It remains MIT's academic computing environment.