Factoring via Network-Enabled Recursion (FAFNER) was a 1995 project trying to solve the RSA-130 factoring problem.

It was an internet-based sieving effort from Cooperating Systems Corporation. Although much human intervention was required to distribute and collate results, this project can be seen as one of the forerunners for internet-based distributed computing

Distributed computing

Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system consists of multiple autonomous computers that communicate through a computer network. The computers interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal...

 projects such as SETI@home

SETI@home

SETI@home is an Internet-based public volunteer computing project employing the BOINC software platform, hosted by the Space Sciences Laboratory, at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States. SETI is an acronym for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence...

 and distributed.net

Distributed.net

distributed.net is a worldwide distributed computing effort that is attempting to solve large scale problems using otherwise idle CPU or GPU time. It is officially recognized as a non-profit organization under U.S...

.