Short answers, pulled from the story.
The institution opened its doors in Oakland in 1869 after California established its first land-grant university with the signing of the Organic Act in 1868. Henry Durant served as the first president starting in 1870 after leading the private College of California.
Ernest Orlando Lawrence founded the Radiation Laboratory in the 1930s and invented the cyclotron particle accelerator. This machine enabled researchers to discover sixteen chemical elements more than any other university has achieved globally.
The Free Speech Movement organized student resistance against restrictions on political activities during 1964 when Jack Weinberg was arrested in Sproul Plaza. Mario Savio delivered his famous Bodies Upon the Gears speech from the steps of Sproul Hall that same year.
The campus spans approximately one thousand two hundred thirty-two acres though only one hundred seventy-eight acres form the central area. South Hall opened in 1873 as the oldest university building in California designed by David Farquharson and features Beaux-Arts Classical style structures including Sather Tower nicknamed the Campanile.
In 2024, Cal joined the Atlantic Coast Conference after historically being members of the Pac-12 Conference. The team has won one hundred seven national championships and two hundred three Olympic medals including one hundred twenty-one gold.
Sixty-three Nobel laureates have been affiliated with Berkeley as faculty or alumni while Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple Inc and Gordon Moore established semiconductor company Intel. Bill Joy created the original Berkeley Software Distribution commonly known as BSD Unix in 1977 and Ken Thompson developed Unix alongside Dennis Ritchie.