Why DC?

[em99010pepe]

To all,

Why you joined the DC world?
I think this is the first time I post this but I joined United Devices project because I had a friend who died with cancer. Well, he was almost like a second father.....:cry: I really though I could make a difference just by running that project or equal ones but I was wrong.

Carlos

[tnerual]

for my part, I started because of study ...:confused:

I had to start again a full year of university because of one stupid teacher :swear: (another long story)

as i only had 2 hours a week to follow (everything was ok except the course of this teacher), I had a lot of time to spend.

part of this time was in one of the computer room of the university looking for easy money on internet ... (never find anything)

and one of the easy money thing was the RC5-64 money price... So from this time, each day I was running 20 pentium2 @ 350 mhz from 8pm to 8am ... (back in 1997)
never got anything.

after that i switched to GIMPS (but unit are way too long) then EULERNET and now RIESELSIEVE (all maths projects, love maths:Pokes: )

the most important thing for DC is projects where everybody get positive results (example factors, prime, ...)

it's boring when you run something without ANY positive results. :cry:

[CaptainMooseInc]

I got into SETI@home originally just because the project was interesting (when I was much younger). Plus I loved the screen saver. Soon I began to be more interested in stats. Then I joined what is now US-Distributed to get into stats. After a year and a half of crunching I finally figured out that if I ran the program in blank screen mode for the screensaver that it would crunch A LOT more work units. Since then my addiction has grown like crazy and now I do it just because I leave all my computers' on 24/7 anywayz so they might as well be working.

-Jeff

[Petey]

I got started with DC projects during the spring/summer of 1999. I was working at the time for one of the original sponsors for S@H and I was called in from time to time to do some performance tuning. Naturally I ran S@H myself and I got hooked.

Nowadays, I tend to run life science projects. Do I think I'll help find a cure for something? Maybe and maybe will do for me.

[Shish]

I got into Seti in `98 after reading a copy of PC World left lying in an airport lounge and finally giving up on my luggable laptop running dos 3.3.
We were also looking for something to run real world loads on minis and suchlike Unix servers at work and Seti was a curiosity which quickly proved very useful for it`s diverse hardware and OS base and it ended up running in some very odd locations as it was relatively trouble free. That particular era was a blur for me of fly here, fly there, work till you drop then fly home to catch up on your sleep. 6 weeks on, 6 weeks off was excellent and allowed me to get the house computerised with the then latest PII 450s in addition to a still owned (originally on "permanent" loan from work) Compaq dual P200 server.
I just kind of drifted through various projects after that but now prefer "Life Sciences" in the hope of helping medical science to find cures for what has put a large dent in my family tree. Just try watching somebody close dying of the morphine overdoses that`s not even keeping them pain free and you`ll know where I`m at and why.
On a lighter note, I once ran Seti on an Inter 386-16 server with the massive amount of 98Mb of memory for fun and it would still be going yet on it`s first wu but I stopped it after 4 months :rotfl:

[edorajh]

I started with S@H primarily it was interesting project to me in that time. Second that sparkle my interest was LifeMapper. After that was GIMPS. And after that I stop counting. I guess I run them for several diferent reasons. First, it is fun to participate in something and try to find something (like primes for example). Second, I like that feeling that I make at least small contribution to some very interesting researches.

Edo

[jasong]

I originally started with Find-a-Drug for about 6 months. After 6 months, I finally realized entering "distributed computing" into a search engine(I forget which one, probably either Yahoo or Google) might get me some new, interesting stuff. I forget what I did right after that, but when I discovered distributedcomputing.info , I became permanently hooked. I love experimenting with different projects and helping out with research.

I think if I ever get sick of the social aspect and surfing the sites, I'll probably simply pick a science project and stick to that, since I'll always like the idea of helping with research.