SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

Re:SETI@home shuts down after 21 years by jgehrcke on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @06:44AM (#22482928)

Back then, I was quite young. Around 2002.

We were like 5 boys getting into overclocking. For our SETI team, the "Bücki crunching connection", from my small hometown in Germany.

I just tried to find an old screenshot from back in the day, and wow I found one, from 2002:

https://imgur.com/a/L5Q5PMR

So funny, it is all there: ICQ, mIRC; an icon to launch Quake III. And some SETI crunching stats. In Internet Explorer.

Seemingly we were actually crunching under one account for the team OC-CARD.de (http://www.setiatwork.com/team/teamstats.cgi?teamid=30308)

You might have done the same, but I am still sharing this because this has influenced me a lot:

I bought an AMD Duron, some arctic silver heat paste. I took a lead pencil to connect some dots on the CPU to unlock the multiplier freely, got a freaking heat sink, and overclocked the hell out of the Duron. I needed to hide this from my parents, but of course the plan was to crunch 24/7.

I found another screenshot, the file is called "[email protected]". Looks like I knew what I was doing:

https://imgur.com/a/eG9nmdO

Edit: looks like our team (OC-CARD.de) was actually among the top 200 of all SETI teams. Wow, yeah there were some serious people in the team, like "Butcho", ranking in the top 1000 of individuals. No idea who that guy was and where he got the compute resources from. That's the romantic part of that Internet era.

Edit2: turned this into a very quick blog post to properly archive my own memory here: https://gehrcke.de/2020/03/setihome-hibernation/

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Re:SETI@home shuts down after 21 years by mstade on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @10:36AM (#22484607)

Oh man those screenshots really are a throwback:

- [x] Quake <3

- [x] Classic windows UI; custom scheme

- [x] Double height task bar

- [x] ICQ & mIRC for all your communications needs; I'll give you a pass for Outlook when there were clearly "better" alternatives like Pegasus ;o)

- [x] Broken icon in taskbar launcher area

I'm loving it, thanks for sharing!

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Re:SETI@home shuts down after 21 years by geniium on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @11:36AM (#22485222)

Was about to write the same :)

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Re:SETI@home shuts down after 21 years by jsjohnst on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @07:43AM (#22483233)

Just wanted to say thx for writing a blogpost. Rare to see great history snippets left as a comment on HN with any link to a longer form content from the author’s perspective if one is curious.

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Re:SETI@home shuts down after 21 years by jgehrcke on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @09:32AM (#22484031)

Thanks for the kind words!

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Re:SETI@home shuts down after 21 years by pmarreck on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @06:47AM (#22482945)

I was a new web developer in that era and the bad taste in my mouth left by that era's Internet Exploiter is still strong. LOL. ugh.

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Re:SETI@home shuts down after 21 years by jtms on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @07:31AM (#22483149)

Younger developers truly don’t understand the pain and suffering IE inflicted

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Re:SETI@home shuts down after 21 years by epanchin on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @09:36AM (#22484062)

Try designing an email newsletter for Outlook. Microsoft really hasn’t moved on that far.

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Re:SETI@home shuts down after 21 years by pmarreck on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @10:10AM (#22484357)

I hear HTML emails are still a "dark art"

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Re:SETI@home shuts down after 21 years by tehlike on Thursday March 05, 2020 @10:16AM (#22494181)

They are. Many unsupportag tags. Thanks outlook.

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Re:SETI@home shuts down after 21 years by nr2x on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @07:59AM (#22483343)

“This site best viewed in Chrome”.

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Re:SETI@home shuts down after 21 years by pmarreck on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @09:36AM (#22484055)

Dude, IE was Windows-only. It went against everything the open Internet standards advocated for. And on top of it, I was a Mac guy, and Mac IE was a completely different beast, so I had to code for Windows IE, Mac IE, then Safari and Firefox and eventually early Chrome. And Windows IE was always the motherfucker who you had to figure out these nasty CSS and JS hacks for to get, forget pixel-perfect, how about pixel-similar rendering vs. other browsers.

If you wanted pixel-perfect it was a fucking nightmare. Literally doubled your work time just to add WinIE compatibility. This was in the IE5/6/7 era.

Speaking of JS... all this was made worse because there were NO good JS libraries at the time to make things easier. Debugging consisted of alerts. Eventually, Prototype (and later Jquery) were literally godsends, and there was some JS lib (forgot the name) which added a reasonable debugger (this was before browsers themselves had reasonably good integrated debuggers!)

Chrome is not like that. The same rendering engine exists on Linux, Windows and Mac, and it has an open-source highly-compatible version, Chromium.

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Re:SETI@home shuts down after 21 years by girvo on Thursday March 05, 2020 @07:13PM (#22499842)

> and there was some JS lib (forgot the name) which added a reasonable debugger (this was before browsers themselves had reasonably good integrated debuggers!)

Firebug changed my life when it came out!

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Re:SETI@home shuts down after 21 years by mnd999 on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @11:57AM (#22485409)

> Dude, IE was Windows-only.

Not originally it wasn’t. The UNIX versions are an interesting relic.

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Re:SETI@home shuts down after 21 years by jaywalk on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @12:13PM (#22485550)

It was available on MacOS as well.

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Re:SETI@home shuts down after 21 years by savoytruffle on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @01:36PM (#22486424)

the grandparent post made the point that for most of its history in the late 90's and early 00's (pretty much all of the CRT iMac era), IE for Mac used an entirely different rendering engine than the Windows version. And then it was abandoned.

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Re:SETI@home shuts down after 21 years by code_duck on Friday March 06, 2020 @02:10AM (#22501572)

Up to version 5.5.

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Re:SETI@home shuts down after 21 years by simonh on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @08:16AM (#22483459)

"This application is optimised for Chrome, but the default browser is Edge. Please cut and paste the following link into Chrome." Literally read this today.

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Re:SETI@home shuts down after 21 years by mcv on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @09:01AM (#22483777)

That's also the case at my workplace. On some machines, IE11 was still the default browser, despite it not being supported.

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Re:SETI@home shuts down after 21 years by FranklinYu on Sunday March 15, 2020 @08:28PM (#22588339)

Do you work for banks or something?

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Re:SETI@home shuts down after 21 years by patrickaljord on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @08:17AM (#22483472)

Chrome is open source and available on all OS. Try running IE with flash and activex on linux in 1999. People today don't know how easy they have it :) (not saying you in particular).

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Re:SETI@home shuts down after 21 years by bergheim on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @01:04PM (#22486072)

That's not really true; chromium is open source. Chrome, while based on chromium, is not.

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Re:SETI@home shuts down after 21 years by 2zcon on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @01:03PM (#22486067)

Where have you seen this?

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Re:SETI@home shuts down after 21 years by jimmaswell on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @01:17PM (#22486222)

I've had sites not work in anything but chrome, specifically one of those bicycle registry sites. I think it was fixed.

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Re:SETI@home shuts down after 21 years by necovek on Friday March 06, 2020 @12:54PM (#22505664)

Well, hover link styling and dynamic HTML in IE3/4 did push the web forward a bit. Not necessarily for the better, but it was influential, and defined some of the things that became standard.

But that was probably a bit earlier, since I was off Windows by '98 or '99.

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Re:SETI@home shuts down after 21 years by ksec on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @08:28PM (#22490080)

That is why I am pissed when they said WebKit ( or even Chrome ) is the new IE when they have never lived or developed during the IE era, even jQuery came much later.

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