SETI@Home Screen Saver
University of California at Berkeley

http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu

It's nice to see a UNIX application on a PC. It's nice to see how programs should be written again. It's nice to see how the 'major players' do it.

The University of California at Berkeley is of course the university across the bridge from Haight-Ashbury, Grace Slick, Moby Grape, and the Dead; the alma mater of UNIX co-father Ken Thompson; the home of the Berkeley Distribution of UNIX, with its C-Shell and History and all that; the starting point for FreeBSD UNIX, which, when running together with Apache, is a favorite for web servers world wide; and the home of Berkeley Sockets, upon which all web traffic software is today based. Not just your ordinary corner-store evening school, in other words.

Now it's also the home for the world wide search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their screen saver not only has that great 'I don't know what it is but it's great!' David Lightman aura about it, it actually helps the people involved collate all their data from the Arecibo Radio Observatory and find out whether the other intelligent life forms out there are sending us reruns of I Love Lucy or not and if so in what language.

When you sign up for the project, Berkeley will download a data file to your disk. It's about 350KB and it will take your computer about 30 hours to process. Meaning the screen saver does a lot more than just look incredibly good. As each chunk of data is processed the screen saver notes the mark and can continue there on its next run if rudely interrupted by you.

Everybody but everybody seems to want to get in on this one - schools, corporations, government agencies - and you can form your own group and assemble data for them within this context too. The idea is basically a good one: if encryption schemes which are impossible to break can be broken anyway, with the immense computing power on the net, then this kind of 'coded message' - radio waves from outer space - can be broken too.

The site itself is amazing. Here you will find full information about exactly what all that neat stuff like Fourier transforms on your computer screen means, see pictures of the actual Arecibo Radio Observatory, and more.

Be careful if you're running one of the older 'hot' Pentiums - this program uses every bit of processing power in its incessant number crunching.

This has got to be one of the best programs ever written for the PC and perhaps the best program ever written for MS Windows. Version 2.04 is only 790KB on the download.