Is SETI@home going to be doing anything to celebrate the rapidly aproaching figure of 1,000,0000 One Million Years of CPU time? This moment will be a historical land mark in the SETI@home history and shows the dedication of its members. It's incredible to think that If a modern computer had been crunching WU's since prehistoric cave man times, it would only just be achieving what we have all done in just a few years. I think that SETI@home should be proud of this achievement and give a very special thanks to all the members who have made it possible. There is nothing we would like more than to multiply the work done to date by ten fold over the next few years. Perhaps with modern machines we will be able to achieve this. Will the new SETI servers be able to cope with the increased work load upon it ??. The more WU's we can all crunch, the better the chance of finding ET, and after all thats what we all want to do !!. Thankyou R.M.Gale

As the 1,000,000 year mark approaches, I would like to suggest a name for this auspicious event. Perhaps one could title it, "The Last Million Years", with a Last Million Years Party at UCB and a segment of the web site devoted to a review of some kind with interviews from the project team about the achievement and perhaps interviews from key sponsors about the achievement. I would like to congratulate you and your colleagues on perhaps the most significant computing effort and perhaps the most significant cooperative effort in human history. The International Space Station is supposed to be a milestone for international cooperation, this may be so for politicians, but for the average citizen, nothing can quite compare to SETI@Home. Again, Thanks! Stan Johnston B.Sc. Geologist

Dear Dr. Anderson, As a long-time S@H participant, please allow me to congratulate you and your team on reaching the 1,000,000 computing-years milestone. Personally, I think this is an even more impressive achievement than the 500,000,000 work units mark, because today's milestone doesn't scale with computing power. If all of your participants get computers that are 10 times as powerful as their old ones, it will still take as many people running the S@H software for as many years to achieve the next 1,000,000 year mark. I note that it took just a bit over three years to achieve this mark. So each year your participatants averaged 300,000 computing years of support. I'm a fairly heavy computer user, but I'll bet my computer spends two-thirds of its time running S@H code. If others are like me, this suggests that you have 300,000 / (2/3) ~= 0.5 million active users. This estimate matches the charts available on your web site. Keeping half a million participants "fed" and happy is a remarkable achievement. In fact, it is probably close to the maximum that any volunteer organization could ever achieve. It is hard to imagine, for instance, any volunteer, long-term, non-crisis effort that attracts and holds ten times as many participants. Perhaps a doubling of your level could be achieved with a great deal of publicity, fan-fare, cost, etc., but I'm not convinced. Truly an extraordinary achievement. Best regards, "rich", class of 5/18/99