A tiny office full of grad students could have come up with a dozen more useful ways to use that many distributed computing cycles, say for medical research. Not only folding@home: imagine what a Wolfram or a Knuth would have achieved with all those cycles.
* A problem that can be cut into chunks small enough for a low end desktop computer
* One that's solvable without communicating with anything else
* The chunk is solvable enough that the user doesn't interrupt the process
* And the bandwidth usage is small
* And the solution is easily verifiable
* And the problem is big enough that it needs a vast amount of hardware to solve
* But is relatively unimportant, so nobody wants to spend any money to solve it faster
Especially the latter parts seem to mostly suggest quirky uses like SETI. If it's something important you can probably do it faster by just finding funding, than by trying to convince millions of people to install a screensaver.
It's actually fascinating. People back then would be eager to find ways to do things. So many people now are lamenters, not doers. Perhaps that's just mean reversion and the original population was more agentic because it was a new tech.
After the geeks and mops, perhaps the ones who follow are the lamenters.
That's like "Oh our best & brightest sunk years and billions into a known-bad type of Alzheimers research? Wait till you hear about Pets.com"
One was a launching platform for dozens of scientific and other large scale volunteer computing projects, and the other's value is entirely based in speculation.