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.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.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.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.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.List of research projects conducted at Berkeley:
- 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.