On Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 07:56:12PM -0500, Olin Lathrop wrote:
> Apollo made this movie to point out the aggregate computing power of a large
> network of "little" machines.  There were over 1000 machines on the Apollo
> network at the time, and special software was written so that you could
> allow your node to participate in the collective rendering when you weren't
> using it, like at night.  Really only Apollo could have done this at the
> time.  Nobody else had that kind of untapped computing power hanging around.
> Others, like government labs, had substantial computing power, but it was
> expensive and needed to be put to good use.

Wow, thanks for sharing that! Reminds me of my first computer, a
1983-built IBM XT my parents (reluctantly) bought for $50... Brings back
memories when everything was bloody difficult!

These days I'd have to write some software to run spare cycles on all
the 18F series PIC chips I have in verious projects, used only because
the extra cost is worth only a few hours of my time and they support C
easilly, running at 20mhz because I'm too lazy to stock anything but
20mhz crystals... Lots of spare cycles! Just no network connections...

-- 
pete@petertodd.ca http://www.petertodd.ca
-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist