The 1997 prototype for parasitic computing

Here's a Hotwired column by Michael Schrage from 1997 that establishes the idea of JavaScript-based MIPsuckers, a prototype of the JavaScript parasitic computing app I blogged yesterday. The page includes an embedded JavaScript that uses your CPU to calculate Pi. Marc "Popular Power" Hedlund sez,

Using Java applets or JavaScript for these projects is good in the sense that it's trivial to have everyone loading/running the latest code revision, since they just downloaded it; but it's bad in the sense that the distributing computing consumer (like SETI) would need to write or rewrite their complex number-crunching code in Java{Script}. In many cases that seems to be an impassable barrier. As several researchers independently told me, "I don't know programming language we'll be using in twenty years, but I know it will be called Fortran."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Marc!)