Computer aided electromagnetic field instruction on Project Athena

Project Athena is a campus-wide computing facility at MIT. It consists of roughly 1000 workstations distributed over the campus, in offices, classrooms, labs and clusters, file servers, print servers, communications interfaces, and so forth. The system is laced together by a system of networks, including fiber optic and coaxial cable, using the Internet protocol. The workstations are Digital Equipment VaxStations and IBM RTs. The operating system used by Project Athena is a locally modified version of Berkeley Unix. The X window system, which was developed at MIT by Project Athena, is the principal user interface. All members of the academic community at MIT have free, unlimited access to the resources of Project Athena. It has become a very important part of the teaching environment. A substantial number of subjects now use the system as part of regular instruction. The use of computer-aided instruction in electromagnetic fields and energy and electrodynamics is discussed.<>