If anyone's looking for a great long-form article about calculating digits of Pi from the good ol' days, this 1992 New Yorker profile of the Chudnovsky brothers (creators of algorithm used by Google here!) is fantastic:
Reading that, it's hard not to see the parallels to Darren Aronofsky's movie Pi. Building a supercomputer in an apartment to find patterns in Pi that have some higher meaning, the computer constantly breaking, etc.