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Comment by jasongill | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this is sad. I remember when this project was released in 1999 - we installed it on all the workstations in our office in an effort to be the first to find ET. Loved bragging about the cool graph, saying it could be an alien signal. Sad to see the project come to an end, even if it was the distant precursor to things like BitTorrent and Bitcoin

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This is even sadder: https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85870&po...

>those tapes will probably also be discarded as well.

Maybe the Berkeley Library would take them.

The UC Berkeley library is getting its funding cut. The physics library and some other have been closed.

it doesn't cost much to put some shelf meters of tapes in the closed stacks.

Do you know how I know you're not a librarian?

Not everything that's old is worth saving.

This is a piece of shared history of computing. It's worth saving. That's different from having funding to do it.

Surely they could auction them on eBay for good money.

We did that as well on a bunch of spare Sun SPARC servers that were considered powerful back in their day. A part of me always wondered if I had been tricked into cracking encryption for the assorted agencies and that this had nothing to do with monitoring the quietest frequency in the galaxy.

Lol! I worked for SETI@home as an undergrad. If something nefarious was going on then my coworkers were extremely good actors, right down to faking an entire codebase and a database filled with processed work units. Hey, I'd probably be suspicious of SETI too if I hadn't worked for SETI. Cheers!

I believe you. I think the missing pieces that triggered those little voices in my head were the lack of the project being open source code at the time and the inability to listen to the signals. I spent my childhood talking on the radio so it just felt like something I should have been able to do.

The open source aspect is a good point. I'm guessing the team thought making the source open would increase the risk of cheating; misguided I know, but cheaters were a pain in the neck at first.

Many of the folks there were into music (in bands, wrote music related software, etc), so I'm guessing the signals were boring to listen to.

That's exactly what an NSA agent would say!

I too tried to use all of our workstations to run this trying to break into the top charts. Oh how young and naive I was thinking the 8-10 computers I had were effective enough for that.

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