University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley (also known as Cal, UC Berkeley, The University of California, or simply Berkeley) is a public coeducational university situated east of the San Francisco Bay in Berkeley, California, overlooking the Golden Gate. The oldest and flagship campus of the University of California System, Berkeley is a leading research university. Its graduate programs and faculty are consistently ranked among the best in the world.

Contributions to computer science

Cal has nurtured a number of key technologies associated with the early development of the Internet and the Open Source Software movement. The original Berkeley Software Distribution, commonly known as BSD Unix, was assembled in 1977 by Bill Joy as a graduate student in the computer science department. Bill Joy also developed the original version of vi. PostgreSQL emerged from faculty research begun in the late 1970s. Sendmail was developed at Berkeley in 1981. BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain package) was written by a team of graduate students around the same time period. The Tcl programming language and the Tk GUI toolkit were developed by faculty member John Ousterhout in 1988. SPICE and espresso, popular tools for IC Designers, were also invented at Berkeley under the direction of Professor Donald Pederson. The RAID and RISC technologies were both developed at Berkeley under David Patterson.

Related Topics:
Internet - Open Source Software movement - Berkeley Software Distribution - Unix - 1977 - Bill Joy - Vi - PostgreSQL - 1970s - Sendmail - 1981 - BIND - Tcl - Tk - GUI - John Ousterhout - 1988 - SPICE - Espresso - Donald Pederson - RAID - RISC - David Patterson

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Perhaps the most pervasive contribution to computing from UCB has been the algorithms and analysis of floating-point arithmetic, led by Professor William Kahan. These include extensive and ongoing contributions to the IEEE 754 standard.

Related Topics:
Floating-point - William Kahan - IEEE 754

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In 1992, Pei-Yuan Wei, an undergraduate, created ViolaWWW, one of the first graphically-based web browsers. ViolaWWW was the first browser to have embedded scriptable objects, stylesheets, and tables. In the spirit of Open Source, he merely donated the code to Sun Microsystems, thus inspiring Java applets. ViolaWWW would also inspire researchers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications to create the Mosaic web browser.

Related Topics:
1992 - Pei-Yuan Wei - ViolaWWW - Web browser - Sun Microsystems - Java - Applet - National Center for Supercomputing Applications - Mosaic

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SETI@home was one of the first widely disseminated distributed computing projects, allowing hobbyists and enthusiasts to participate in scientific research by donating unused computer processor cycles in the form of a screen saver.

Related Topics:
SETI@home - Distributed computing

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In an interesting example of the confluence of intellectual ideas, many of the arguments for the efficacy of Open Source software development, and of the Wikipedia project itself, find parallels in writings on urban planning and architecture published in the late 1970s by Christopher Alexander, a Berkeley professor of architecture. Across campus around that same time period, John Searle, a Berkeley professor of philosophy, introduced a celebrated critique of artificial intelligence using the metaphor of a Chinese Room.

Related Topics:
1970s - Christopher Alexander - Architecture - John Searle - Artificial intelligence - Chinese Room

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The XCF, an undergraduate research group now located in Soda Hall, has been responsible for a number of notable software projects, including GTK, The GIMP, and the initial diagnosis of the Morris worm.

Related Topics:
XCF - GTK - The GIMP - Morris worm

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List of research projects conducted at Berkeley:

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• Daedalus project - Combine intelligent adaptive applications with smart networking software that can multiplex connections over a wide variety of different networking technologies.
• Digital library project
• GiST - A Generalized Search Tree for Secondary Storage
• Harmonia research project - open interactive programming tools
• Sather - Object oriented language derived from Eiffel programming language
• Not Another Completely Heuristic Operating System - Instructional software for teaching undergraduate, and potentially graduate, level operating systems courses.