  This paper contains some personal reflections on several computational
contributions to what is now known as the "String Theory Landscape". It
consists of two parts. The first part concerns the origin of big numbers, and
especially the number $10^{1500}$ that appeared in work on the covariant
lattice construction (with W. Lerche and D. Luest). This part contains some new
results. I correct a huge but inconsequential error, discuss some more accurate
estimates, and compare with the counting for free fermion constructions. In
particular I prove that the latter only provide an exponentially small fraction
of all even self-dual lattices for large lattice dimensions. The second part of
the paper concerns dealing with big numbers, and contains some lessons learned
from various vacuum scanning projects.
