Interviewing Shnal and Bwhite

[NeoGen]

(Hopefully they'll see this and answer my questions... )

From what I gathered, you two are the grandfathers of the AMD Users Team! So come on guys... tell us all about it!

1. How did you guys came up with the idea?
2. How was the Distributed Computing back then?
3. How many DC projects were there? (and which ones were they?)
4. With which project(s) did the AMD Users Team start?
5. Who were the big teams at the time?
6. How good was our Team in the rankings of those initial projects?
7. What were the major difficulties and turning points that you remember the Team has gone through? (and when)
8. Looking back at the very start and seeing how the Team evolved during the years (and is now among the greatest teams in the world) how do you feel?

[AMDave]

I'd also like to know:

How and where did they all meet online, in the days of yore?
What was the first AMD they had?
Did they expect DC projects to go this long?
Is DC development ahead or behind where they thought it might be by now?

[Lagu]

Hej

NeoGen and AMDave.

You both have good and interesting questions. If we got an answer on all of them it should show our history and we should have it on our new homepage under "Who we are" or "Our history"

Lagu :D

[shnal]

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

[shnal]

If you guys do want to use this for the "who are we" page then I think you should combine my answers with those of Bruce, and Vaughan too. Vaughan wasn't long behind in joining us in Ubero.

[vaughan]

Ahh! that was a nice trip down memory lane. How things have evolved, the history of the team is fascinating stuff. I remember running mighty Pentium 100 with 32 MB RAM and it blitzed my office machine a 486 with 8MB RAM in Seti@Home Classic.

I discovered DC'ing when I was surfing the net looking for information about Fractals - Julia sets and Mandelbrot sets and so on. Somehow I came upon Seti Classic and ran it as a screensaver. Next I ran Parabon, Distributed Net and Prime 95. I put Lisa's "Super 350" Pentium II to work on Prime 95 and about a year later it completed a task. Woot!

I tried Dcypher Net and one day was suffering from the flu really bad and feeling miserable thought I'd use Altavista to look up info on Influenza. I found Popular Power which was a DC project requiring an always on connection but it was searching for a cure for influenza.

After this I tried many other projects - Folderol, Folding @ Home, Genome @ Home, Golem@Home (sounds like Tolkien hey!), Fight AIDS @ Home and SaferMarkets from Entropia. I stumbled across Ubero and as I had a Biochemistry major at Uni thought it was pretty interesting. Having run it for a little while I posed an open question on their forum asking which team I should join and why.

Bruce and shnal replied, among others - Free-DC was one too - but I had just bought my first AMD powered pc. It was my Athlon XP2000+ and it tore through Ubero tasks compared to my then workhorse PIII-733. AMD Users seemed like a good choice so I joined them. I haven't felt the need to change teams since.

[NeoGen]

What great times must have been...

Starting a team from nothing and slowly see it going up to where we are now.

Bruce... the stage is yours now ;)

[Brucifer]

Sorta drifting off a bit from another Bruce and team but in the same time frame:

Another big team back then was "Team Seti USA" (TSU) which later evolved into U.S. Distributed. That was in the early Seti days, and there were quite a few of us that crunched there and then later moved over to Free-DC around the same time frame. I crunched under the name Brucifer in those days. It was a kick really. More and more DC projects kept coming on line, and that detracted from the Seti thing. It added a real degree of competition among the various teams. I remember the AMD teams, and while using AMD cpu's, I was a hard core TSU guy then. But it was fun, and there was a lot of good-natured bantering between the teams. But the main thing as I see it, was that at that point in time, all the teams, and all the non-team seti crunchers too, all of us together via the Seti project really proved the value and ability to realize the power available from the public to be put to use for a huge distributed project. And Seti was the big one that opened a lot of eyes in the world. And all the early players had a part in that regardless of what team they were with.

And even back then, I was really surprised at the number of "old farts" involved in this. Myself, I had sorta really expected that I would be a rarity, but I found out that there were lots of people participating that were in their 40's, 50's and 60's, even back then.

And as for a question further up about where did the people congregate on line back then and earlier. This software now used here is just a growth projection of the early BBS software, PCBoard, Wildcat, WW, and many others. I hosted a BBS back then. In those days you had to have multiple phone lines into your house/business site wherever you hosted the BBS. I remember my first "HST" modem I bought, and thought I was really hot $hit with that thing. LOL Nowdays you just need a good full time pipe into the net. Was really a hoot and a kick!!!!! And it still is.

Back in the BBS days, I remember when my first 340mb hard drive cost me close to $1,000. I was a working computer geek then and could afford it, and it was for the BBS........ and man, did that tick off the wife!!!! :roll:

Brucifer -- the other Bruce

[NeoGen]

I might be wrong, but I think your story goes even before AMD Users was created.

Which means you must be in DC'ing probably for longer than any of us...
What was the first DC project you remember? :P

p.s. - And Bruce(bwhite), the stage is waiting for you ;)

[Brucifer]

I might be wrong, but I think your story goes even before AMD Users was created.

Which means you must be in DC'ing probably for longer than any of us...
What was the first DC project you remember? :P

The first DC project that I messed with was seti.