I'll have a go!

1. There was no great plan I'm afraid, I was in college and I could't afford a new PC so I decided to work part time and buy the components bit by bit.

It was an AMD Duron 800 OCable to 1000! Had 128MB ram and later 256MB, an older Voodoo PCI 16MB graphics (which was great for its time), and I think the FSB was 133. All parts were from overclockers.co.uk and the chip was tested and guaranteed to run at 1GHz.

When this was done, I wanted to benchmark the new computer and I choose to use seti@home to do this - why? I'm not sure now. Reading more about seti raised my awareness of DC, and so I found Ubero. I didn't know of Bruce yet.

I later decided to make a team in Ubero, and noticed that a lot of teams had limited themselves in terms of members by their team names so I decided that the team name would be something a bit more open.

It occurred to me that something AMD would be good because of the whole AMD vs Intel thing, plus the fact that it wouldn't exclude anybody in terms of their location, etc

So there you have it, AMD Users team was founded within the Ubero project!

I was now learning HTML in college, and the first website was made using notepad! Well this did give us a means of communication for all members. The website itself evolved firstly when Bruce donated use of his webspace, and then when the site became amdusers.com.

2. DC back then - I was no expert but I believe there were a lot fewer projects back then. However I do recall Distributed folding plus a few others quickly becoming available to run. (Vaughan, Bruce correct me if i'm wrong here?)

3. Umm...

4. Ubero, I had tried out the team thing with seti previously, but it wasn't AMD Users and nobody wanted to join! It was called "UK Crunch" and I should never have put "UK" in there, I think maybe the likes of the US has a few more people online? lol

5. Free-DC, Team MacNN, Team Picard, ARS Technica, Dutch Power Cows... and the like, you would find that whenever they wanted to, they could easily "turn things up" if they needs be. These teams were very hard to challenge, as a beginning team, or so it seemed in Ubero.

6. I can remember that when Bruce, Vaughan and I, plus a few others were running Ubero, It was a mid-term goal to be in the Ubero top ten teams. Vaughan and Bruce more than most, made this happen.

7. Well at one point we had quite a few members, that would join, run a few units and then stop, some of the time I wouldn't even get a reply to my welcome email. So the hardest thing is to get members that will run any given project on a long term basis. Of course this is totally up to the individual, but it was somewhat annoying, because if we had another ten Bruces and another ten Vaughans, then we would most likely have sailed to #1 in Ubero.

8. I feel that the team has allways moved forward in a positive way, that the team, totally belongs to it's members. We have admins and so on but it really is nothing without the continued participation from it's members.

We are now one of the best, and while we may not be #1 (going from what the DC Vault says!) there is every chance that we can get there. Really, we're now ranked overall above some of the teams which were way ahead in the days of ubero, and to name some of them:

The Nights Who Say Ni!
Dutch Power Cows
Team Picard
ARS Technica

I feel glad that the team now has so many people that want to be involved. I think that this will continue and that new members will join and participate as long as we are open to that.

--------------

I hope I've answered these questions effectively, if not please feel free to ask again. Bruce - I think it's your turn now! hehe