I've still got 4 years to go, but I have no plans to stop before then.


Unless, of course, we find ET and he declares thermonuclear war on us.

;)

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Bah thermonuclear. they'll have sharks with laserbeams attached to their heads. That or mutant ill-tempered seabass

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

It will be 10 years for me on 5-29-09. Yeah it was fun back then. I started with a Pentium 166 MHz and never looked back. Paid $2600 for the computer from ABS. Build my first computer so I could get more w.u. done. Can you imagine if that money was spend today how much faster one could crunch? Anyway congratulation to us all on 10 years of fun. MrJeep

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Aye, less than a month and I'll be at 10 myself. Think it was a P200 back then, of course it doesn't compare to todays units, but it chugged along just fine. Had a number of things come up in the following years and got a bit away from SETI, but got bit by the bug(and back into it) about 3-4 years ago, and started putting it on all my machines. It's just grown from there. Now working on the diskless farm, once that gets running, we'll really be contributing! Now if I could just afford to drop a 295 vid card on each of them.... ;)

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Somebody correct me if I'm wrong on the timetable, but I seem to remember that in late 1998 I read about SETI@home getting up and going. Unfortunately, it required a Windows/Intel machine and I was using a Mac. Then (if memory serves) in very early 1999 it became available for Macs but required a newer version of the operating system than I had on my machines (System 7.5 maybe). I got the requisite System not long after but then I found that it was only for Power Mac processors and all I had was 68x00 (mostly on LC III's then. I got my first iMac (a 333MHz blueberry) in May and started up as soon as I could.

Does any of this ring a bell with anyone? This does not seem to quite square with the Wikipedia article but it might fit in with the alpha and beta releases. Any light that can be shed on this would be appreciated.

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Plus SETI Classic = 21,082 WUs

Yeaaah.... I started 29 October 1999, after reading for SETI in ona local computer magazine that I worked for as a translator...

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Ah, the good old days:



And that was only what was in the garage!

Part of my SETI classic farm from back in the day.

#1 and #17 look familiar. Never crunched on my #1 look alike, but I started on a look alike for #17 moving later to an HP I got just before the prices started dropping on the new 1 gig models. . . I should have waited another couple of weeks. .

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Ah, the good old days:



And that was only what was in the garage!

Part of my SETI classic farm from back in the day.

#1 and #17 look familiar. Never crunched on my #1 look alike, but I started on a look alike for #17 moving later to an HP I got just before the prices started dropping on the new 1 gig models. . . I should have waited another couple of weeks. .

In ruminating the BWGB Era of Seti (Before We Got BOINKED) it reminds me of my garage - but after retirement this stuff has disappeared under stuff from the house the Mrs. wants to put in a garage sale somtime this century. I would like to find out if the stats still have the lookup I used to do most - look up if you processed any candidates for a second look. I miss that system - can't get too excited about keeping my RAC going up and all the rest of the stats going down. It was nice to think that WU you sumitted was interesting enough to go back and look again - to find ETI.

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Classic WU= 7,237 Classic Hours= 42,079

I collected machines from everywhere. Yard sales, Deseret Industries, you name it.

Some of them had to be babied since there were lock ups from time to time, but no where near the kinds of issues we run into today.

10 years on and I still have to RDP into each one to make sure they are running.

Those old machines were donated to the Idaho Youth Ranch many many moons ago. It's still kind of fun to look back at that picture and remember what it was like.

I had them all out in the garage during the winter and back in the house in the summer. Just got too hot in the garage for all those boxes. I remember long nites of loading windows 98 and the seti command line client.

I have even forgotten the name of that program I used to cache work units. It had a nice map of the sky to show you where the WU's were from.

Yup, was fun.

Now we all have bigger and more sophisticated machines. It would be interesting if someone could run that old command line client with the small WU's they originally sent out just to see how long it would take on a nice Core i7. Just for giggles.

Rob

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I have even forgotten the name of that program I used to cache work units. It had a nice map of the sky to show you where the WU's were from.

SetiStash?

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You will be assimilated...bunghole!

... I have even forgotten the name of that program I used to cache work units. It had a nice map of the sky to show you where the WU's were from.

My setup was:

SetiQ -> s@h-classic + SetiSpy

all running on WINE on a linux system.

Back in those days (before the optimizers!), the Windows compiled client gave a speed advantage over the *nix gcc compiled version (compiler flags issues?...). linux gave by far the best continuous uptime. I was also running Win95C at the time and that was reliable enough until you filled up any of the 64k byte resource tables!! (Talk about pussy-footing around the desktop so as not to cause a crash... Those were the Windows days!)

SetiQ gave you a very nice star map of all the WUs that it had seen. SetiSpy showed the running status.

Boinc is in effect very similar to that functionality plus now all the added infrastructure support.

All good fun,

Happy crunchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

I have no idea how I found SETI. It's been almost 10 years after all! It kept my 486DX2-66 (still works) warm on many cold nights. I never did figure out how to get my Heathkit H89 to do SETI tho :-)

Little did I know how much money this would ultimately cost me. My 486 has grown (I won't tell how you grow new computers from a 486) in to a small garden running multiple projects on my house network with BOINC. At least I now have an excuse to buy the latest computer even tho I wouldn't need the latest and greatest wiz-bangs for my normal use.

As a pack rat I've kept all my old computers. The H89 and the 486 still work, but can't do anything useful these days. I'm still running a couple of 1.3 Celerons (upgraded from the eye-popping 600MHz P3 they started with). They don't do SETI anymore, but they still can do SOMETHING. My electric company loves me.

wow it has been a long time. wife still thinks i am nutz.
:)

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wow it has been a long time. wife still thinks i am nutz.
:)

LOL. In that 10 years, i had to explain SETI to 2 wifes and a bunch of girlfriends. They all think i am nutz. Explaining SETI to wife-candidate #3 now...because she is very interested in why that machines keep running 24/7 :)

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Wait... maybe i am nutz..... but im sure that is not because of SETI

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It's the power bill that becomes hard to justify. When I had all my SETI rigs off at home for a while, the power bill dropped by $125 a month.

I justify it because not only do the rigs at home run SETI, but they are my test bed and lab for all the stuff I do at work. I'm a systems admin for a large mfg co but they give me NO money for R&D. All that gets done out of my pocket and out of my house. And I guess I really don't mind since i love doing this line of work.

I was looking at a new Core i7 the other day. Made the mistake of having my wife along with me. She asked why I needed another computer when I just got a new i7 a couple months ago. Then when I didn't respond she goes "Oh, you want another SETI machine huh?"

I've been married for 17 years now and running SETI for 10 of those years so I would assume if she had a problem with it I would have heard about it by now. But we all know how women are and she could just be building for a huge unload one day. Hope not.

I had a bunch of machines crunching for United Devices a long time ago too. I was actually winning enough money from them at the time to pay for the added utility bills. Then they quit paying participants and I lost interest. Never lost interest in SETI though.

I'm one of those users that likes doing SETI for the science as well as the credit. I like to watch the RAC climb, and see how well I match up with my contribution to those of others. I think friendly competition is great for this kind of charity. Some take it a bit too seriously though and lose sight of what its all about. The numbers are great but it's what we are hoping to discover with it that drives most of us on.

The advent of CUDA is awesome. I get to pack more horsepower into the same gorilla rack in the garrage without having to make room for another case. Of course, some of those cards cost about as much as a whole PC anymore.

Speaking of which, I went to look into grabbing another 295 for my Ci7 and found them virtually non-existant. Even EVA's website shows them out of stock. And the ones that have them want almost $100 more than they MSRP. Grrr.

Okay, guess I can stop ranting now.

Rob

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I'm one of those users that likes doing SETI for the science as well as the credit. I like to watch the RAC climb, and see how well I match up with my contribution to those of others.

I just noticed in your stats graphic that you just recently moved up from 17 to 16 overall. Looking at the top 20, I'd say that's quite a feat to be proud of, even more than the 1 million pending you just reached. :)

I was a late starter, still 8mo. to go.I'll post again then.

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2 months to go for me!

I started out with a 266mhz Celeron (no level 2 cache!) with 64 mb of memory. My current 2.53ghz Celeron has as much memory (2gB) as my original machine had disc space.

Originally I had to run the machine overnight to avoid missing Seti Classic WUs - just like Astropulse now...maybe time to find a 26ghz Celeron??? :D

My wife thinks BOINC is the spawn of the Devil, as she seems to want to actually do stuff on our computers, like edit documents and create websites - whatever next?

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Originally I had to run the machine overnight to avoid missing Seti Classic WUs - just like Astropulse now...maybe time to find a 26ghz Celeron??? :D

The original SETI@Home did not set deadlines for their workunits.

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