Launched just weeks earlier in May 1999, SETI@home used a screensaver program to distribute chunks of radio telescope data to volunteers' personal computers worldwide, letting ordinary people's idle processing power search for potential alien signals. By late June the project had already attracted hundreds of thousands of participants, becoming one of the largest and most successful experiments in distributed computing ever attempted.
Before 'crowdsourcing' or 'cloud computing' were household terms, a team at UC Berkeley figured out that millions of home computers sat idle most of the day, and that this collective dormant power vastly exceeded any supercomputer then in existence. SETI@home broke down enormous batches of radio telescope data recorded at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico into small work units, distributed automatically over the internet to any volunteer's machine running its free screensaver.
The screensaver itself became a cultural artifact of the late-90s internet — a swooping, colorful visualization of frequency spectra that let ordinary users feel, for a few seconds, like a real SETI researcher scanning the cosmos for E.T.
Within its first weeks the project's volunteer base exploded past expectations, eventually growing to millions of users across nearly every country on Earth and logging more aggregate computing time than any project in history to that point. Though it never detected a confirmed extraterrestrial signal, SETI@home proved the viability of volunteer distributed computing, directly inspiring successors like Folding@home that would later help researchers model proteins and fight diseases including COVID-19.
Key people: David Gedye, Craig Kasnoff