The Experimental Computing Facility is a student-run organization at the University of California at Berkeley, providing computing resources to students. It was founded on a basic principle - that there is value in creating a "hacker environment", where students can explore computing with each other, working at all hours of the day, bouncing ideas off of each other, and working without worrying about competing with other students for computing resources. The university provides the XCF with "living space", and the members have access to several DECStation 3100's and a SPARCstation or two. The cluster of computers was affectionately nicknamed the "scam" cluster, and the individual machines named "scam", "fraud", "swindle", "graft", "con", "cheat", "scheme", and "bilk" - in honor of the way in which the students had weaseled access to the computers. In exchange, the XCF members help other students with problems, while only approving projects which somehow benefit the computing community.
The people who created the XCF are a unique bunch - some of the best engineers of their generation. Collectively, they are responsible for many facets of BSD UNIX and many well-known pieces of software, such as Xtrek and multi-player empire. They gained some notoriety in 1988 by being among the first to discover the Robert T. Morris Internet worm, and by being *the* first to take the worm apart, figure out what it was doing, and figure out how to stop it.
I was attracted to the atmosphere that the XCF provided, so I approached them about letting me join. They had a project called XMAP, which they suggested. The project involved databases from the US Census Department called DIME and TIGER, which contain complete street information for whichever region they represent. The XMAP project involved writing a graphical interface which could read in the DIME or TIGER information and display a map. The user could zoom and pan down to individual blocks, seeing street names and addresses. My portion involved taking the 80+MB US Census database and reduce it to something small enough to exist in memory. I managed to reduce databases to 90% of their original sizes.
I cannot express the extent to which the XCF made my career possible, both in terms of the experience it provided and the contacts it gave me. It is important that groups such as this be supported, because they provide the real-life experience that a classroom just does not.