The Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) is a student group at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

(MIT) that helps students access computing resources and use them effectively.

History

SIPB was founded in 1969 by

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, Gary Gut, David Burmaster, and Ed Fox. At the time, computers in universities were still expensive resources reserved for funded research projects. Through an arrangement with the MIT administration, SIPB administered student accounts on university-owned computers. This allowed students access to MIT's timeshared computers when computers otherwise cost millions of dollars and were as big as an entire room. In 1983, MIT launched

Project Athena Project Athena was a joint project of MIT, Digital Equipment Corporation, and IBM to produce a campus-wide distributed computing environment for educational use. It was launched in 1983, and research and development ran until June 30, 1991. , At ...

, an initiative to create a distributed computing system for educational use. SIPB was instrumental in the creation of Project Athena and helped to provide MIT students with access to computing resources for independent projects. Project Athena led to several important Unix technologies such as X11,

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, and network filesystems. SIPB set up a

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server at www.mit.edu in 1993, when the number of public web servers was roughly 100 and long before university Web sites became common. When MIT finally did set up an official website, it was at web.mit.edu.

Projects

SIPB has been instrumental for funding technical software projects that benefit the MIT community. These have included:
scripts.mit.edu
a dynamic

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MIT Minecraft
a virtual MIT campus in

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CourseRoad
a course planning aid for MIT students
Debathena
a set of software packages for

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clients
XVM
a

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service
BarnOwl
an

client

References

External links

SIPB homepage
{{MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology student life Computer clubs