Something about SETI@home that doesn't get said enough: it didn't just do science, it created a category.

Before it, "distributed computing" meant institutional grids, cluster access, gated systems. SETI@home proved that aggregating idle cycles from millions of ordinary machines was a legitimate scientific method. That proof changed what was possible.

Folding@home came next. BOINC was built to formalize the template. Distributed citizen science became a recognized mode of doing research. None of that path was obvious before SETI@home walked it first.

What's strange is that cheap cloud compute kind of ended this era not by failing but by succeeding. Why donate your CPU when AWS is a credit card away? The economics shifted. But something got lost too — the screensaver running while you slept, the knowledge that your specific machine was doing something real in the world. That personal connection to a distributed effort hasn't really been replicated.

elicash's question is the right one. Could distributed agents revive the model? Maybe. But I suspect the hard part isn't the architecture — it's recreating the feeling that your contribution matters when it's one of ten million.