Founded in 1986, the eXperimental Computing Facility (XCF) is an undergraduate computing-interest organization (in contrast to the Open Computing Facility

Open Computing Facility

The Open Computing Facility is an ASUC funded group at University of California, Berkeley.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...

 and the Computer Science Undergraduate Association, which support most of the general-interest computing desires of the UC Berkeley 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

Network News Transfer Protocol

The Network News Transfer Protocol is an Internet application protocol used for transporting Usenet news articles between news servers and for reading and posting articles by end user client applications...

, GTK+

GTK+

GTK+ is a cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. It is licensed under the terms of the GNU LGPL, allowing both free and proprietary software to use it. It is one of the most popular toolkits for the X Window System, along with Qt.The name GTK+ originates from GTK;...

, GIMP

GIMP

GIMP is a free software raster graphics editor. It is primarily employed as an image retouching and editing tool and is freely available in versions tailored for most popular operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, and Linux.In addition to detailed image retouching and...

, Gnutella

Gnutella

Gnutella is a large peer-to-peer network which, at the time of its creation, was the first decentralized peer-to-peer network of its kind, leading to other, later networks adopting the model...

, and Viola

ViolaWWW

ViolaWWW, first developed in the early 1990s, for Unix and the X Windowing System, was the first popular web browser which, until Mosaic, was the most frequently used web browser for access to the World Wide Web...

. Members of the XCF were instrumental in defending against the Morris Internet worm.

Notable alumni

Notable alumni of the organization include:
Gene Kan

Gene Kan

Gene Kan 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"...

, Spencer Kimball

Spencer Kimball

Spencer Kimball is a computer programmer most notable for his early work on the GNU Image Manipulation Program .In 1995, while students at the University of California at Berkeley, Kimball and his classmate Peter Mattis developed the first version of The GIMP as a class project...

, Peter Mattis

Peter Mattis

Peter Mattis is a computer programmer most notable for his early work on the GNU Image Manipulation Program .In 1995, while students at the University of California at Berkeley, Mattis and his classmate Spencer Kimball developed the first version of The GIMP as a class project...

, Pei-Yuan Wei

Pei-Yuan Wei

Pei-Yuan Wei is the creator of ViolaWWW, the first popular graphical web browser.Pei-Yuan Wei was born in Taiwan. He graduated from Berkeley High School in 1986 and received his higher education at the University of California, Berkeley.-Controversy:...

, and Phil Lapsley

Phil Lapsley

Phil Lapsley is an electrical engineer, hacker, 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 science in 1988 and 1991...

External links

• XCF web site
• Salon.com article on the history of the Experimental Computing Facility and its role in creating free software