Version 0 of Never was CPU time more pointlessly wasted

For tales of computing tasks, where much work was put into computing something (which perhaps wasn't all that interesting to begin with). It's not about the goal, but about the journey there.

Of course, a rule for this kind of story is that the more elaborate and efficient the program used, the better. Anyone can waste lots of CPU time by being stupid, but it's an art to waste CPU time on a task when performing it efficiently.

For an oldie, FPX writes in factorial on his efforts in computing these. It ends with:

: Eventually, I extended my program to work over a network, and had 70 workstations grinding away for 48 hours on the computation of 1000000!. Never was CPU time more pointlessly wasted.

[ Category Performance | Category Humor ]