[gamer191]

Well it led to the creation of BOINC, a distributed computing system that probably has led to scientific advances in other fields

So I wouldn’t say it was all for nothing, but it’s main benefit was the idea, and not the results it generated

[andsoitis]

> system that probably has led to scientific advances in other fields

Did it though?

[nicbn]

Wikipedia has a table for how many papers each project produced:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Open_Infrastructure_f...

According to this, Rosetta@home (which is like Folding@home that runs on BOINC) produced 234 papers.

[Izkata]

Except as a kid back then, the screensaver was trivial to install and neat to look at, and BOINC was a pain. I dropped it when they switched. I imagine some less-technical adults who were interested did as well.