Mining Gridcoin since 20 Sep 1999 here! Of course, cryptos didn't exist then, but SETI@home did and BOINC arrived soon thereafter.
Yes, the idea of volunteer computing is much older than crypto and I missed the Bitcoin train because of it (didn't want to abandon my scientific computations because of some dubious hashing). However, I made sure I don't miss the Gridcoin train :)
Exactly, I've missed allot but gridcoin i won't.
I remember back in the day when i was hashing with a poor 9800 nvidia gard. Sold 12 bitcoins for 12$. Now it seems such a bad decision, but that was a high price at that time.