This page is a collection of all newsletters and interesting articles produced by the S.E.T.I@home team and external resources.

Newsletters

Older News.

December 29, 1999 Happy Holidays and New Year from the SETI@home team. Thanks to our users, the project is going great. SETI@home is now the largest computation ever performed on Earth. We're hard at work keeping our servers running, preparing a new release of the screensaver program, and starting our second-phase data analysis. We've received many interesting and encouraging emails from users, including one that's especially appropriate for this time of year.

November 12, 1999 SETI@home has been honoured by Popular Science as one of the 100 of the year's best achievements in science and technology. Please vote for us in their Reader's Choice poll (in the Computers and Software category).

October 22, 1999 SETI@home has now accumulated more than 100,000 years of computer time, more than any other computing project in history! We have recorded over 85 million "candidate signals" (spikes and Gaussians) in our database, and we're preparing to start the second phase of analysis, which will search these candidates looking for "repeat events".

August 18, 1999 SETI@home has been named as one of Popular Science's "50 Best Of The Web." This annual award recognises the site for "its excellent science and technology content". Thanks!

August 14, 1999 SETI@home eclipses one million user mark. Early this morning (Berkeley time) Ed Bradburn from England became the millionth SETI@home user. Mr. Bradburn writes: "The excellent film of Sagan's 'Contact' really got me interested in the concept of reaching out to search the stars (something I've been intrigued by ever since reading Asimov's 'The Gods Themselves' and Sagan and Shklovskii's 'Intelligent Life in the Universe'). I'm proud to be the 1,000,000 participant in the SETI@Home project and hope that there'll be many more!"

Congratulations to Mr. Bradburn and our other million users, to our software and web site volunteers, and to the SETI@home team. In less than three months, SETI@home has significantly expanded the SETI search, has increased awareness of SETI in homes and classrooms, and has become the largest computing project in history.

August 11, 1999 Go here to read the transcript of the Yahoo! Chat Event on July 30.

July 28, 1999 There will be a Yahoo! Chat Event devoted to SETI@home from 5 to 7 PM (PST) this Friday 7/30/1999.

June 12, 1999 The response to SETI@home has been wonderful. It's been four weeks since launch and already there are 600,000 participants! SETI@home is now our planet's largest supercomputer -- spread out over 205 countries. We are extremely grateful to all the SETI@home participants.

May 17, 1999. Launch! The SETI@home project is successfully underway.

May 13, 1999. The Windows and Mac versions of SETI@home are now available for download. We are upgrading our FTP server performance in preparation for the final launch on May 17. We made a snapshot of statistics from the beta-testing period, and reset all totals to zero. Congratulations to Kyle Granger, Charlie Fenton, and Brad Silen, who did a fantastic job on the Windows and Mac versions.

May 4, 1999. The Windows and Mac versions of SETI@home are now in the hands of 7,000 beta testers. Problems involving firewalls and proxies are being fixed. We're on schedule for the May 17 launch.

April 6, 1999. We released the UNIX version of the SETI@home client. Within a few hours, a couple of thousand people were using the program. As expected, this created a heavy load on the server for the first time, and we hastily fixed a number of problems.

March 28, 1999. We are continuing beta-testing and debugging of the Windows and UNIX versions of the client. The Macintosh version is nearing completion. We're still on schedule for an April launch, though it may be towards the end of the month.

February 22, 1999. Our server-side software has been modified to use an Informix relational database for all storage.

January 20, 1999. The University of California Digital Media Innovation Program has awarded SETI@home a grant to match funding from our sponsors.

January 20, 1999. The Windows version of the client now seems to be stable, and we have expanded testing to about 50 users. We have started porting the client to Macintosh, and are also rewriting the server-side software to allow it to handle 100,000+ users.

November 20, 1998. Today we began testing the SETI@home screensaver with real users. Our first distribution was to 3 users, and over the next few months we will ramp up to 100 or so.

November 20, 1998. The data recording system is completed and operational at Arecibo. We have begun recording and collecting tapes (35 Gigabytes each) of the data the will eventually be distributed to SETI@home users.

October 7 1998. We have received some funding commitments (announcements forthcoming). We have begun development of the data recorder and the data-handling software, and are continuing development of the client software.

July 30 1998. Several dozen volunteer programmers have contributed to the development of the client program, and volunteers from around the world have translated the web page into several languages. Engineering Design Team Inc. (EDT) has donated analog-to-digital interfaces for the data collection system.

We continue to seek the funding that we need to complete the science-only version of the system. We have some good possibilities, but nothing definite so far. Because of this, the schedule for the science-only version has slipped at least a couple of months.

June 10 1998. The UC Berkeley SETI program received the Smithsonian Institute medal for first place in 1998 science and technology innovation. More...

June 1998. Sun Microsystems has agreed to make a donation of computer hardware to SETI@home. This donation is of major importance, as the computers will form the backbone of our data recording and distribution systems.

May 1998. The Center for Electronic Art in San Francisco is running a workshop to design an enhanced Web site and other graphical elements for SETI@home.

March 1998. The Planetary Society has offered its support to the project as a co-sponsor, and will be assisting us in recruiting other sponsors.

September 1997. More than 35,000 people have joined the SETI@home mailing list, many after seeing Dan Werthimer discuss the project on the Discovery Channel. Also during September -- the first magnetic tape of test data from Arecibo was returned to Berkeley. This will be used to test the analysis algorithms, and get an initial sense of the terrestrial interference characteristics.

August 1997. Dan Werthimer was interviewed on NPR's All Things Considered. Other stories this month included one by PC World. The SETI@home mailing list grew to 10,000 people. Senior members of the SETI Institute accepted invitations to sit on our advisory board.

June 1997. The SETI@home web site was established, and David Gedye was interviewed by the New York Times.