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Andrew: a distributed personal computing environment

Authors:

James H. Morris,

Mahadev Satyanarayanan,

Michael H. Conner,

John H. Howard,

David S. Rosenthal,

F. Donelson SmithAuthors Info & Claims

Communications of the ACM, Volume 29, Issue 3

Pages 184 - 201

https://doi.org/10.1145/5666.5671

Published: 01 March 1986 Publication History

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Abstract

The Information Technology Center (ITC), a collaborative effort between IBM and Carnegie-Mellon University, is in the process of creating Andrew, a prototype computing and communication system for universities. This article traces the origins of Andrew, discusses its goals and strategies, and gives an overview of the current status of its implementation and usage.

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Reviews

Reviewer: Robert Joel Hofkin

Andrew is a project for personal computing in universities. Individual workstations communicate with shared processing elements. The system provides computer-aided instruction, computer-based tools, personal computer-mediated communication, and database retrieval services for its users. The paper outlines the history of Andrew, a joint project of Carnegie-Mellon University and IBM. Three major companies—the shared file system, the user interface, and the backbone network—are described at length in a tutorial style. The 3–M machines (containing a million-instruction-per-second processor, a million display pixels, and a megabyte of memory) represent a significant landmark in personal computing power, and Andrew is a significant use of these machines. This paper will be a valuable historical reference and also a useful text for people designing networks of personal computers.

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Published In

Communications of the ACM Volume 29, Issue 3

The MIT Press scientific computation series

March 1986

71 pages

ISSN:0001-0782

EISSN:1557-7317

DOI:10.1145/5666

Editor:
Peter J. Denning

Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 March 1986

Published in CACM Volume 29, Issue 3

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Marinescu D(2023)Cloud data storageCloud Computing10.1016/B978-0-32-385277-7.00014-2(215-256)Online publication date: 2023
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Abstract

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Cited By

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Andrew Tanenbaum: Writing the Book on Networks

Personal Computing Spawns Diverse Magazines, Viewpoints

Andrew McCollum

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