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Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
anji@metalhead.club ("Matthijs De Smedt") wrote:

The original 1974 "The UNIX Time-Sharing System" paper describes how their systems put spare CPU cycles to use, as presumably CPUs back then could not yet dynamically clock down to save power. Neat.

Source: https://dsf.berkeley.edu/cs262/unix.pdf

There is a “background” process that runs at the lowest possible priority; it is used to soak up any idle CPU time. It has been used to produce a million-digit approximation to the constant e – 2, and is now generating composite pseudoprimes (base 2).