EXperimental Computing Facility
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EXperimental Computing Facility
Founded in 1986, the eXperimental Computing Facility (XCF) is an undergraduate computing-interest organization at University of California, Berkeley. The "Experimental" description was given in contrast to the Open Computing Facility 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, Article on the history of the Experimental Computing Facility and its role in creating free software. GTK+, GIMP, Gnutella, and Viola. 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, Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis, Pei-Yuan Wei, and Phil La ...
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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 university and the founding campus of the University of California system. Its fourteen colleges and schools offer over 350 degree programs and enroll some 31,800 undergraduate and 13,200 graduate students. Berkeley ranks among the world's top universities. A founding member of the Association of American Universities, Berkeley hosts many leading research institutes dedicated to science, engineering, and mathematics. The university founded and maintains close relationships with three national laboratories at Berkeley, Livermore and Los Alamos, and has played a prominent role in many scientific advances, from the Manhattan Project and the discovery of 16 chemical elements to breakthroughs in computer science and genomics. Berkeley is ...
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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 bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a member of the student club, the eXperimental Computing Facility (XCF). In the 1990s, Wei was a founding employee of Global Network Navigator, one of the first Internet-based businesses. Later he worked for various Palm OS-related businesses. Since 2008, Perry has been living in both Taiwan and the US, and has devoted most of his time to taking care of his ill family member. Controversy Pei-Yuan Wei was at the center of a controversy over patents relating to embedded objects in a web browser, which revolves around whether his browser, ViolaWWW, had the capability to launch embedded objects, prior to the date a patent was filed by Michael David Doyle of Eolas, and the Univers ...
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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 (GIMP) while still in college, and assisting the source code development of CockroachDB, the namesake software of Cockroach Labs. Early life and education Mattis attended the University of California at Berkeley. While still a student in 1995, he developed the first version of GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), along with his roommate Spencer Kimball. Mattis was also a member of a student club at Berkeley called the eXperimental Computing Facility (XCF). Mattis graduated from Berkeley in 1997 with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. According to Mattis in 1999: On free software and the motivations to write it and what makes good and enduring free software: Career Mattis was previously employed as an engineer for ...
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Spencer Kimball (computer Programmer)
Spencer Kimball is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and business executive. He is the CEO of Cockroach Labs, a company he co-founded in 2014. His work as a programmer includes creating GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) while still in college, and assisting the source code development of CockroachDB, the namesake software of Cockroach Labs. In addition to Cockroach Labs, Kimball was involved in the founding of other tech startups including WeGo and Viewfinder. Early life and education Kimball attended the University of California at Berkeley. While still a student in 1995, he developed the first version of GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) as a class project, along with his roommate Peter Mattis. Kimball was also a member of a student club at Berkeley called the eXperimental Computing Facility (XCF). During his time with XCF, he co-wrote the code for GIMP. Kimball said in 1999 that, "From the first line of source code to the last, GIMP was always my 'dues' ...
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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 Gnutella protocol. Kan worked together with Spencer Kimball on the program called "gnubile" licensed under the GNU General Public License. Kan graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1997 with a major in electrical engineering and computer science , and was a member of the student club the eXperimental Computing Facility (XCF). In June 2000, when Kan was 24, he formed a distributed search engine known as InfraSearch.com with Steve Waterhouse and another friend. Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen was an investor in the start-up. InfraSearch was purchased by Sun Microsystems on March 6, 2001 for $12.5M USD in Sun stock options. The acquisition became part of the JXTA project at Sun. Kan joined Sun as an employee, and co ...
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Free On-line Dictionary Of Computing
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (FOLDOC) is an online, searchable, encyclopedic dictionary of computing subjects. History FOLDOC was founded in 1985 by Denis Howe and was hosted by Imperial College London. In May 2015, the site was updated to state that it was "no longer supported by Imperial College Department of Computing". Howe has served as the editor-in-chief since the dictionary's inception, with visitors to the website able to make suggestions for additions or corrections to articles. Open sourcing The dictionary incorporates the text of other free resources, such as the Jargon File, as well as covering many other computing-related topics. Due to its availability under the GNU Free Documentation License, a copyleft license, it has in turn been incorporated in whole or part into other free content projects, such as Wikipedia. Recognition * This site's brief 2001 review by a Ziff Davis Ziff Davis, Inc. is an American digital media and internet company. F ...
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Jonathan Blow
Jonathan Blow (born 1971) is an American video game designer and programmer. He is best known for his work on the independent video games ''Braid'' (2008) and '' The Witness'' (2016). Born in California, Blow developed a passion for game programming during middle school and later pursued a double degree in computer science and creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley. He dropped out of college and briefly worked as a software developer before he started a game company with a friend. Once the company closed a few years later with the dot-com bubble bust, Blow worked as a game development contractor. He co-founded the Experimental Gameplay Workshop and wrote a monthly column for '' Game Developer'' before he started part-time work on ''Braid'' in 2005. The game was released in 2008 to critical acclaim, made Blow a millionaire, and is often credited with catalyzing a period of independent game development in the years following its release. He co-founded investment ...
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ViolaWWW
ViolaWWW is a discontinued browser, the first to support scripting and stylesheets for the World Wide Web (WWW). It was first released in 1991/1992 for Unix and acted as the recommended browser at CERN, where the WWW was invented, but eventually lost its position as most frequently used browser to Mosaic. Viola Released in 1992, Viola was the invention of Pei-Yuan Wei, a member of the eXperimental Computing Facility (XCF) at the University of California, Berkeley. Viola was a UNIX-based programming/scripting language; the acronym stood for "Visually Interactive Object-oriented Language and Application". Pei's interest in graphically based software began with HyperCard, which he first encountered in 1989. Of that, Pei said, "HyperCard was very compelling back then, you know graphically, this hyperlink thing, it was just not very global and it only worked on Mac ... and I didn't even have a Mac". Only having access to X terminals, Pei, in 1990, created the first version of Viola ...
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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 greater academic community of the University of California, Berkeley. Its stated mission is to provide an environment where no member of Berkeley's campus community is denied the computer resources he or she seeks, and to appeal to all members of the Berkeley campus community with unsatisfied computing needs and to provide a place for those interested in computing to fully explore that interest. Here, the term "campus community" does not include all area residents and excludes those persons without official connection to either the university or a university-sanctioned organisation. As part of the OCF's goal of being open and inclusive, the OCF publishes its board meeting minutes, tech talks, and Unix system administration DeCal materials ...
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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 computers increasing to over three million nodes by January 2006.On the Long-term Evolution of the Two-Tier Gnutella Overlay
Rasti, Stutzbach, Rejaie, 2006. See Figure 2a.
In late 2007, it was the most popular file-sharing network on the Internet with an estimated market share of more than 40%.


History

The first client (also called Gnutella) from which the network got its name was developed by Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper of Nullsoft in early 2000, soon after the company's acquisition by AOL. On March 14, the program was ...
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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 tasks. It is not designed to be used for drawing, though some artists and creators have used it for such. GIMP is released under the GPL-3.0-or-later license and is available for Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows. History In 1995, Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis began developing GIMP – originally named ''General Image Manipulation Program –'' as a semester-long project at the University of California, Berkeley for the eXperimental Computing Facility''.'' The acronym was coined first, with the letter ''G'' being added to ''-IMP'' as a reference to "the gimp" in the scene from the 1994 ''Pulp Fiction'' film. In 1996 was the initial public release of GIMP (0.54). The editor was quickly adopted and a community of contributors formed. ...
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