My, doesn't time fly.Happy Anniversary! On this date {17th May 1999} in 1999, SETI@home came online. Since then millions of our volunteers have helped us sift through petabytes of data from multiple radio telescopes. ET still hasn't shown up to the party.
We're not discouraged. We're able to examine less than a tenth of a percent of the radio spectrum, over only 1/3 of the sky and a limited number of additional stars. But our capabilities are increasing every day. In 1999 it took up to a week to process a single workunit on a home PC. Now, on a machine with a GPU, it might only take a few minutes to do a far more detailed and more sensitive analysis. Who knows what the next 20 years will bring?
My official join date is actually 3rd April 1999 - the same date as Eric Korpela...but there is a reason for this...which one day I might tell people.
But for now, officially, I am one of the few still active members who've had an account with SETI@home for the longest period.
regards
Tim
