From: Adam L. Beberg (beberg@mithral.com)
Date: Tue May 09 2000 - 05:34:13 PDT
Yeap, i've been up all night, we all know that means bad things, so
here's what I came up with :)
http://cosm.mithral.com/~beberg/unhistory.html
Geneology of some projects
OK, someone had to do it. With all the "cycle selling" efforts out
there, (my list is now at 19 quasi-commercial ones) not all of them
mentioned here because some people just take things the wrong way. I
decided the claims of "unique/original business plans" are getting so
funny that I had to write up a list of who came when and who they most
directly decended from. Please don't take this too seriously, the
dates aren't exact, and who knows how "X happens to look exactly the
same as Y". This will be very useful for reporters and investors doing
due diligence as well.
The List
In approximate date order, as best I can do. I was there for all this,
in fact I note what I was doing at some times, so it should be fairly
correct.
* [1]DCS - (1973 - 197?) - The fully working distributed computing
system that I consider the grandfather of just about everything
today. It now being 2000, any and all patent claims to anything in
the field are pure BS, woohoo!
* Much time passes, cant say I was paying attention much.
* Globus and Legion started back in here I think, the 2 major
distributed computing research projects, if you have a
supercomputer and Internet-2, you should be using one of these.
* ~1991 - I start doing distributed raytracing and things on Novell
networks. And in my day we didn't have no stinking toolkits! I
start paying attention to things, goto college, catch up to what
happened since 1973, etc.
* ~1995 - Cosm is born, originally an OS design based on Mach, QNX,
and dozen other research designs in distributed operating systems.
* GIMPS/PrimeNet (? - now) - effort to find large Mersenne primes.
At some point the, guy doing the PrimeNet server for GIMPS took it
commercial. Client-server. Commercial.
* DESCHALL (? - ?) - Effort to break DES, a 56 bit algorithm,
contest sponsored by RSA. Client-server.
* OGR (Jul 97 - May 99) Optimal Golomb Rulers, now a distributed.net
project. Client-server.
* Genx - (feb 97-mar 97) RC5-56 effort, another 56bit. Inspired by
DESCHALL and also another RSA challenge. Died a horrible death of
DoS attacks between waring teams. Client-server.
* distributed.net - (may 97 - now) Picked up where Genx died with
RC5-56 after Bovine wrote proxys/servers and Duncan redesigned
clients. Originially intended as a general framework, but.
Client-server.
* "v3" - (Oct 1997 - *) Cosm first talked about publicly, known as
"v3" at the time. Somewhere in that 2 years I gave up on the OS
idea, realizing that they were now commodities, so there was no
point.
* PiHex - (Apr 98 - now) Calulating Pi to an extreme length.
Client-server.
* ECDL - (??? ?? - done) Eliptic curve contest. Client-server.
* ... Up until about this point, everyone talked to everyone else.
Now only a few talk anymore.
* SETI@Home - (Jan 99 - now) Hunting alien signals from space.
Around for since 1996, SETI actually starts public betas.
Client-server.
* Cosm - (Apr 99 - now) Cosm splits from distributed.net as they
want to go different direction. "v3" dies, and Cosm is announced
as a separate project. Development continues in public. Fully
distributed. Commercial but free for many uses (with source!).
* Casino-21 - (Apr 99? - now) Climate modeling.
* ... During the summer of 99 SETI gets very popular and everyone
starts yelling "me too, me too". The words "like SETI@Home does"
start to appear everywhere.
* dcypher - (??? 99 - ?) A direct distributed.net decendant run by a
disgruntled distributed.net participant. Competed at CSC for a
while, then moved on to gamma flux. Now working with ProcessTree.
Client-server. Commercial.
* ProcessTree - (??? 00 - now) Just a list of names until joining
with dcypher. Client-server. Commercial.
* Porivo - (Feb 00 - now) SETI/distributed.net clone run by 3
marketing guys. Client-server. Commercial.
* PopularPower - (Mar 00? - now) SETI/dcypher clone. Client-server.
Commercial.
* Centrata - (May 00 - now) A Porivo clone. Commercial.
* ... And many more I left out, but more to come I'm sure.
References
1. http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~farber/ring1.gif
- Adam L. Beberg
Mithral Communications & Design, Inc.
The Cosm Project - http://cosm.mithral.com/
beberg@mithral.com - http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/
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