Turing Award laureate Ken Thompson (left), BS 1965, MS 1966, with fellow laureate and colleague Dennis Ritchie (right); together, they created Unix Berkeley alumni nurtured a number of key technologi

he Hubble Space Telescope,[128] resulting in a National Medal of Science.[128] Peter Smith (BS 1969) was the principal investigator and project leader for the $420 million NASA robotic explorer Phoenix,[129] which physically confirmed the presence of water on the planet Mars for the first time.[130] Astronauts James van Hoften (BS 1966), Margaret Rhea Seddon (BA 1970), Leroy Chiao (BS 1983), and Rex Walheim (BS 1984) have physically reached out to the stars, orbiting the earth in NASA's fleet of space shuttles.
Undergraduate alumni have founded or co-founded such companies as Apple Computer,[131] Intel,[132] LSI Logic[133] The Gap,[134] MySpace,[135] PowerBar,[136] Berkeley Systems,[137] Bolt, Beranek and Newman[138] (which created a number of underlying technologies that govern the Internet), Chez Panisse,[139] GrandCentral (known now as Google Voice),[140] Advent Software,[141] HTC Corporation,[142] VIA Technologies,[142] Marvell Technology Group,[143] MoveOn.org,[137] Opsware,[144] RedOctane,[145] SanDisk,[146] Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker,[147] VMware,[148] and Zilog,[149] while graduate school alumni have co-founded companies such as DHL,[150] KeyHole Inc (known now as Google Earth),[151] Sun Microsystems,[152] and The Learning Company.[153] Berkeley alumni have also led various technology companies such as Electronic Arts,[154] Google,[155] Adobe Systems,[156] and Qualcomm.[157]


Turing Award laureate Ken Thompson (left), BS 1965, MS 1966, with fellow laureate and colleague Dennis Ritchie (right); together, they created Unix
Berkeley alumni nurtured a number of key technologies associated with the personal computer and the development of the Internet.[158] Unix was created by alumnus Ken Thompson (BS 1965, MS 1966) along with colleague Dennis Ritchie. Alumni such as L. Peter Deutsch[159][160][161] (PhD 1973), Butler Lampson (PhD 1967), and Charles P. Thacker (BS 1967)[162] worked with Ken Thompson on Project Genie and then formed the ill-fated US Department of Defense-funded Berkeley Computer Corporation (BCC), which was scattered throughout the Berkeley campus in non-descript offices to avoid anti-war protestors.[163] After BCC failed, Deutsch, Lampson, and Thacker joined Xerox PARC, where they developed a number of pioneering computer technologies, culminating in the Xerox Alto that inspired the Apple Macintosh. In particular, the Alto used a computer mouse, which had been invented by Doug Engelbart (B.Eng 1952, Ph.D. 1955). Thompson, Lampson, Engelbart, and Thacker[164] all later received a Turing Award. Also at Xerox PARC was Ronald V. Schmidt (BS 1966, MS 1968, PhD 1971), who became known as "the man who brought Ethernet to the masses".[165] Another Xerox PARC researcher, Charles Simonyi (BS 1972), pioneered the first WYSIWIG word processor program and was recruited personally by Bill Gates to join the fledgling company known as Microsoft to create Microsoft Word. Simonyi later became the first repeat space tourist, blasting off on Russian Soyuz rockets to work at the International Space Station orbiting the earth.
In 1977, a graduate student in the computer science department named Bill Joy (MS 1982) assembled[166] the original Berkeley Software Distribution, commonly known as BSD Unix. Joy, who went on to co-found Sun Microsystems, also developed the original version of the terminal console editor vi, while Ken Arnold (BA 1985) created Curses, a terminal control library for Unix-like systems that enables the construction of text user interface (TUI) applications. Working alongside Joy at Berkeley were undergraduates William Jolitz (BS 1997) and his future wife Lynne Jolitz (BA 1989), who together created 386BSD, a version of BSD Unix that runs on Intel CPUs and evolved into the BSD family of free operating systems and the Darwin