I remember seeing a prank program years ago that showed the SETI@home screensaver for a bit, then popped up an alert box saying "Alien Life Found!" with options to submit or cancel(!).

If you tried to submit it would spend a while with a really slow progress bar, and then say it failed to submit and asked you to contact SETI directly. I wonder if anyone actually did....

I wonder if that screensaver ever made it into the Xscreensaver BSOD screensaver. I hope so.

My dad did a similar thing with a bunch of computers at his store. It made way more sense back when processors didn't clock down efficiently so there was such a thing as 'wasted/excess clock cycles' you could donate to a distributed computing project. Now though processors shut off cores, reduce their clock speed etc so there's a lot less spare processing power you can siphon off without increasing power draw.

True but it was much cheaper when a computer you might have on for other reasons wouldn't consume noticeably more power for your donation, eg computer lab admins which I think made up some of the top contenders of the leader boards. There were definitely groups that would run clusters of computers just for the donation (my dad was one of those too, there was no other reason to run those PCs other than Seti@Home) but for the average home user it was spare cycles that were low cost to free.

I am here to inform you that people were doing this for a variety of reasons, and one of those absolutely was because the cycles were free and going to waste.

It was my screensaver too and it felt like the most sci-fi thing ever. I'd stare it while daydreaming about aliens.

Wow! My screensaver was some guy's project to invent running and walking creatures from leverages and wheels via genetic algorithms. I can't remember project name neither .edu domain connected to it.