I recently saw a toot on Mastodon about the end of the SETI@Home program… and it brought back memories of the late 1990s.
SETI@home was quite an idea back in the 1990s: donate some CPU time, process some radiotelescope data on your PC, and you might help scientists find whether E.T. is out there phoning us. Of course I ran the software quite a bit, maybe even too much for the taste of my boss at the time, who found the whole idea inane and useless.
These days, instead of looking for extraterrestrial life, people use their GPUs to generate cryptocurrencies. Sign o’ the times.