Founded in 1986, the eXperimental Computing Facility (XCF) is an undergraduate computing-interest organization at
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant un ...
. The "Experimental" description was given in contrast to the
Open Computing Facility
The ''Open Computing Facility'' is an ASUC
chartered program at the University of California, Berkeley, first founded in
1989.
The OCF is an all-volunteer, student-run, student-initiated service group
dedicated to free computing for the grea ...
and the
Computer Science Undergraduate Association, which support most of the general-interest computing desires of the campus. As such, the XCF stands as a focus for a small group of computer-scientists uniquely interested in computer science.
Members of the organization have been involved in projects such as
NNTP
The Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) is an application protocol used for transporting Usenet news articles (''netnews'') between news servers, and for reading/posting articles by the end user client applications. Brian Kantor of the Univers ...
,
[ Article on the history of the Experimental Computing Facility and its role in creating free software.] GTK+
GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and prop ...
,
GIMP
GIMP ( ; GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image manipulation (retouching) and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized ...
,
Gnutella
Gnutella is a peer-to-peer network protocol. Founded in 2000, it was the first decentralized peer-to-peer network of its kind, leading to other, later networks adopting the model.
In June 2005, Gnutella's population was 1.81 million compute ...
,
and
Viola
; german: Bratsche
, alt=Viola shown from the front and the side
, image=Bratsche.jpg
, caption=
, background=string
, hornbostel_sachs=321.322-71
, hornbostel_sachs_desc=Composite chordophone sounded by a bow
, range=
, related=
*Violin family ...
.
Members of the XCF were instrumental in defending against the
Morris Internet worm.
Notable alumni
Notable alumni of the organization include:
Jonathan Blow,
[ FOLDOC entry about FMPL, a programming language Blow created while at the XCF.] Gene Kan Gene Kan (September 6, 1976 — June 29, 2002) was a British-born Chinese American peer-to-peer file-sharing programmer who was among the first programmers to produce an open-source version of the file-sharing application that implemented the Gnutel ...
,
,
Peter Mattis
Peter Mattis is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and business executive. He is the CTO and co-founder for Cockroach Labs, a company he co-founded in 2014. His work as a programmer includes launching GNU Image Manipulation Program ...
,
Pei-Yuan Wei
Pei-Yuan Wei () is a Taiwanese-American businessman who created ViolaWWW, the first popular graphical web browser.
Career
Pei-Yuan Wei was born in Pingtung County, Taiwan. He graduated from Berkeley High School in 1986. He received his bache ...
,
and
Phil Lapsley Philip D. Lapsley (born 1965) is an electrical engineer, hacker, author and entrepreneur.
Early life
Lapsley attended the University of California, Berkeley in the 1980s, graduating with a B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering and computer scie ...
.
References
External links
*
*
**
University of California, Berkeley
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