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The new year has passed, and Team Lamb Chop is now perched at the #1 team position overall.  This is going to be one of two different "articles" that will be comparing the team now, to where it stood when I first started keeping track of stats.  This installment will look at the team stats, and how the team progressed through the rankings over the past year or so.  The second installment will take a look at the team makeup and will be concerned more with individual members.

Rankings
How did it all begin?  Sometime in the last week of July, 1999 there was an article on the Ars Technica front page talking about their SETI@Home team "Team Ars Technica Lamb Chop".

Calling all SETI space marines: new client!
A big phat congrats is in order to all 561 members of the Ars SETI team!  We're ranked #4 on the club list, squeezing by Team User Friendly and the FreeBSD team.  We're in a tough position now: with fewer people than the three teams in front of us, we're gonna need more help to pull forward, especially when team #3 has 10,000 more units than us.  Wow! 

Of course, it's all in fun, really, but hey, join up!  There's a new client available (1.06) for Windows and Mac.  If you run NT, I recommend the text-based client, still.  It's definitely faster. -Cæsar

I thought it sounded pretty interesting so i downloaded the SETI client and then joined TLC on 7/21/99.  My memory is kind of fuzzy so some of the details that follow may not be entirely correct :).  At the time, there really wasn't a good place to discuss the SETI@Home project other than some loose threads on the Ars Lounge Forum.  Of course, back then the forums were a bit different, but the functionality was about the same. 

When I first joined, Team Lamb Chop was the #4 Club Team, and I believe something like the #13 or so team Overall.  Heck the project was pretty young back then and really hadn't caught on too well yet.  Even though the project was just really starting, many of the top corporations had a *HUGE* lead over all the club type teams, Sun, SGI, Compaq, Microsoft and Intel were the top cookies (not necessarily in that order).  The top team (SGI at the time) had a huge lead over even the top club team (Slashdot at the time).  SGI had I believe 4-5 times the WU total that Slashdot had. 

The overall picture looked pretty bleak, so hey the goal was conquering the club team scene.  The standings had Slashdot on top, followed by the MacAddict Team, next was O'Grady's PowerBook team and then sat TLC.  TLC wasn't that far behind PowerBook so soon it became a race for #4.  Barely two weeks after joining the S@H project, I fired up Excel and inserted the first data to keep track on how we were doing compared to PowerBook.

Hey...the stats started out small ;).  Over the next couple of weeks, I added a couple more teams to keep track of, and then started to keep track of the number of members on the teams.  Here is how things looked a week after the first numbers came off the Berkeley servers:

Of course, you can see what was going to happen with that Art Bell team.  Within a week or two they were past TLC, and about a week or so after TLC passed PowerBook.  Here is a graph showing the "early days"

Over the next several months some more teams were being kept track of, and usually every week I was keeping track of the top teams overall (hey just something to shoot for :).  Some teams fizzled out, and then I dropped them from the stats I was keeping track of, then there were others to pick up.  The following graph is a compilation of ALL the team WU stats that I have kept track of since the beginning.  The graph may be kind of large, but there is alot of information in the graph!

Pretty impressive eh?
There are a couple of things to note in the graph above.  Can you say parabola?  Or maybe hyperbola? :)  Since Art Bell passed TLC eons ago, no other team had passed TLC (unless you want to count the guru antics over the past year or so).  There have been some major shifts in some of the work unit lines.  The ones that affected all of the teams were due to problems with the stats servers over at the Berkeley home offices.  There was a huge backlog of work units which resulted in the shifts in Feb. and June 2000.  The other shifts in work units with TLC (and Sun) were due to the shifting of teams between Sun and TLC with the different guru accounts.  From the graphs, there really haven't been that many teams which consistently increased their output over time.  TLC is the king in that regard.  The only teams which have stepped up things over time have been the Knights Who Say Ni!, and maybe MacAddict.  SETI.Germany seems to have stepped it up some, but with the other teams, their lines, at best, are linear.

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