Earlier this week, Seti@Home announced that they would no longer distribute further work (forum link). It has been a long time since I ran any distributed computing client – from early ones attempting to crack a 56-bit key (completed 1997) to Seti@Home for various groups. I think I stopped running these programs around the time I had to pay my own power bills. Coincidence I’m sure.
I certainly wasn’t as passionate as some who would overclock their main systems, run their systems 24/7 to grind out new blocks, or cobble together multiple junked systems to create a working one, but they were still fun projects to run for a period, particularly when my Pentium Pro was the fastest system on campus. Thanks Dad for encouraging the nerdiness and/or for fixing my nerd cred after coming to school with just a 486DX2 (circa 1996). Harking back to a simpler time when you had to run a wire down the hall to establish a network. And had to remember the SLI’s patrol schedule so that you could pull the cable back into the room before they noticed!