The XCF office is located on the ground floor of Soda Hall, a jade green building housing UC-Berkeley's computer science department. It's roughly 20 by 30 feet, and computer guts spill out onto a series of cluttered tables that are also dotted with intact machines and monitors. Posters cover the walls, including one that reads: "Need Unix Help? Have Programming Questions? The Doctors Are In." A futon with a ratty orange blanket is crammed into one corner, next to a bathroom.

The office, used now by about eight current XCF members, gives a visitor little room to move about. But that very lack of space is one clue to the origin and culture of the club. UC-Berkeley has long suffered a shortage of rooms. When the university reorganized its turf in the mid-1980s, the existing computer center available to undergraduate hackers was set to be shut down. So Phil Lapsley and nine other computer enthusiasts wrote a proposal to establish an undergraduate-run facility that would both offer computer help to campus members and produce useful software projects.

The university agreed to the proposal, and in 1986 the XCF was born. Lapsley was the first director. He says his motivation for starting the club came from picking up coding tricks from other hackers at the earlier computer center.

"It just dawned on me, 'My God, if you can just get all these people together in the same place, you can drastically increase how quickly people can learn,'" he says.

University administrators gave the XCF a half-dozen Sun Microsystems workstations -- a coup at the time. The scarcity of powerful machines all but forced early XCFers to work together. Lapsley and Kurt Pires, another co-founder, came up with a course to teach fellow undergraduates the C computer language, which wasn't offered by the university. The XCFers also helped one another figure out how to make their programs tighter, more elegant and more efficient.

The XCFers weren't just tinkering around for fun. They were also under the gun to come up with programs that improved computing at the university, if not the entire world. That translated into a club admissions policy requiring would-be XCFers to propose a significant project. The pressure to keep the office also contributed to the culture of frank feedback. Often, XCFers spent more time on club projects than class work, and those who slacked off on their XCF work were asked to move on.

About one member a year would drop out, Lapsley recalls.

"I was one of the ones who got slapped around a lot," says Jim Griffith, an early XCFer. "But it's really hard to complain about being slapped down like that when it's done in the pursuit of making you a better engineer."

Griffith, 34, now works as a software engineer with Go.com, after spending five years with a map-related programming firm. That work drew on his XCF project, a graphical representation of U.S. Census data. He credits the XCF for significantly improving his skills.

"By the time I left, I knew more about Unix than just about anybody at Berkeley who wasn't in the XCF," he says.

It might not be a big stretch to say Griffith and other XCFers knew more about Unix than most people in the world in the late 1980s. Berkeley was ground zero for Unix expertise, having gained that distinction by spearheading the development of the BSD Unix operating system for the Defense Department. The Pentagon wanted a commonly accessible, free operating system for the research organizations linked together on Arpanet -- the Internet's predecessor.

Berkeley professor Bob Fabry had secured the contract for the work in the mid-1970s. He set up the Computer Science Research Group, which was spearheaded by Bill Joy and later by another graduate student named Kirk McKusick.

One of the hallmarks of the CSRG was welcoming coding improvements to Unix from a wide community of programmers throughout the world. McKusick says coders working together proved vital to the work.

"That was one of CSRG's lasting legacies," he says. "We set up a model that showed you could get 300 to 400 people to work together."

Lapsley was one of those people when he first got to Berkeley -- and the Internet Worm caper offered a perfect example of how cooperation could work. Lapsley and Pires were used to the occasional undergraduate trying to hack into their machines, and had set up the equivalent of trip-wire programs that would alert them to suspicious activity. So they noticed the worm hitting their machines at the beginning of the attack, the evening of Nov. 2. Peter Yee, another XCFer, quickly sent out an e-mail to the hardcore techies then on the pre-World Wide Web version of the Internet. Part of Yee's e-mail was later quoted in Life magazine's year-end issue: "We are under attack."

But the XCF and the CSRG quickly went to battle stations. Members of both groups worked in concert to dissect the virus' code, analyze it and write patches to neutralize it. Over the course of a few days, those vaccines were zapped out to panicking system administrators nationwide.

The Army, the Navy and the state of Florida all asked the XCFers for help. After staying up all night the evening of the attack, Lapsley walked back to his apartment dazed but proud.

"I remember being aware how this really momentous thing had happened, and the XCF was at the heart of it," he says.

The worm victory wasn't the only significant contribution by early XCFers. A club member named Pei Wei created Viola, one of the very first Web browsing programs. Lapsley also developed NNTP, a technology that still helps Internet users access Usenet newsgroups, and the hackers came up with some computer game advances, including an early multiuser Internet game called "xtrek" and an air-traffic control simulation.

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