Project Vincent
From Rofflehaus
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Before the Windows and Macs, there were Project Vincent workstations. Before people send instant messages, they sent zephyrgrams.
Back in the 1980's, there were several efforts to make computing resources more generally available to the academic community at various institutions of higher learning. Andrew at Carnegie-Mellon University led to the creation of a network-distributed filesystem known initially as the Andrew File System (later to drop the full gloss, becoming known simply as AFS). At MIT, the Hesiod directory service, Kerberos distributed authentication service, the Zephyr notification service, and the Moira list management service were developed and included in what was known as Project Athena.
The deployment of a distributed-computing infrastructure at Iowa State included AFS, Kerberos, Hesiod, Zephyr and Moira, adapted to and running on hardware and operating systems provided by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), and later, by Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI). Workstations located in departmental offices and laboratories outside of the Computation Center's facilities would then interface with these services over the campus network. Taken together, this collection of technologies for distributed computing became known as Project Vincent.
By the turn of the 21st century, commodity desktop computers became so powerful, cheap, and ubiquitous as to largely obsolete the initial goal of providing at least some kind of computer beyond a centralized facility. Although desktop computers largely superseded the workstations deployed as part of the project, the network-based service infrastructure continued in operation, filling many of the same roles for desktop computers as they did for the earlier workstations.
