Athena contributed to the early Pixar efforts (perhaps before they were Pixar?) I remember seeing Project Athena credited at the end of one or two of the animations. They just celebrated their 25th anniversary http://web.mit.edu/ist/isnews/v23/n05/230510.html The article notes other Athena contributions such as Kerberos

Athena was important not only in the distributed computing resources it provided for the MIT community, but also in its contributions to computing at large. The most notable contributions are probably the X Windows system, the windowing system foundation for most Unix/Linux distributions, and Kerberos authentication, used by Windows, Mac OS X, and again many Unix/Linux distributions.

Athena was certainly a milestone. It is almost comical now days to think that students were limited to 1 Megabyte of RAM at the start of the project.