Current Trends in Data Base Systems

Tomorrow's data base systems will be organized around a common architecture, data distribution techniques, and new specialized processors.     

Project Athena as a distributed computer system

Project Athena, established in 1983 to improve the quality of education at MIT (Massachussetts Institute of Technology) by providing campuswide, high-quality computing based on a large network of workstations, is discussed, focusing on the design of Athena's distributed workstation system. The requirements of the system are outlined distributed system models are reviewed, other distributed operating systems are described, and issues in distributed systems are examined. The distributed-system model for Athena is discussed. Athena has three major components; workstations a network, and servers. The approach taken by the Athena developers was to implement a set of network services to replace equivalent time-sharing services, in essence converting the time-sharing Unix model into a distributed operating system