Andrew Project

The Andrew Project was a distributed computing environment developed at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) beginning in 1982. It was an ambitious project for its time and resulted in an unprecedentedly vast and accessible university computing infrastructure.

History

The Information Technology Center, a partnership of Carnegie Mellon and IBM, began work on the Andrew Project in 1982. In its initial phase, the project involved both software and hardware, including wiring the campus for data and developing workstations to be distributed to students and faculty at CMU and elsewhere. The proposed "3M computer" workstations included a million pixel display and a megabyte of memory, running at a million instructions per second. Unfortunately a fourth M, cost on the order of a megapenny (US$10,000), made the computers beyond the reach of students' budgets. The initial hardware deployment in 1985 established a number of university-owned "clusters" of public workstations in various academic buildings and dormitories. The campus was fully wired and ready for the eventual availability of inexpensive personal computers.