Features

Green Future: Engineers Forge Novel Technologies For A Sustainable World

Engineering faculty members (clockwise, from left) Arun Majumdar, Samer Madanat, Paul Wright, Arpad Horvath and Jasmina Vujic on the banks of Strawberry Creek on campus. They are just five of the many UC Berkeley researchers working on new technologies, infrastructures and other novel approaches to curb carbon emissions and reverse centuries of global climate change.

An Intentional Life: Software engineer Charles Simonyi (B.S.’72 Eng Math) scores success with space sojourn

Alumnus Charles Simonyi scores success with space sojourn He is no stranger to bold ventures. At age 17, he left his family behind in communist Hungary, with no intention of returning, to pursue his dream of becoming a computer programmer. When government authorities discovered the defection, it was his father who took the punishment by having his electrical engineering professorship stripped from him. The boy would not see his family again until 1989, when the Iron Curtain fell.

Project Genie: Berkeley’s piece of the computer revolution

Mid-1960s computers were enormous, room-filling machines that only major corporations, government agencies and universities could afford. Prohibitively expensive, they functioned like today’s programmable-memory calculators: no words, no images, no sounds or music, no networking, just number crunching. IBM manufactured most of these mainframes to run the accounting systems and print the paychecks of the world’s corporations.