[from ‘berserk’, via the name of a now-deceased record label; poss. originated by famed columnist Herb Caen] Humorous distortion of “Berkeley” used esp. to refer to the practices or products of the BSD Unix hackers. See software bloat, Berkeley Quality Software.

Mainstream use of this term in reference to the cultural and political peculiarities of UC Berkeley as a whole has been reported from as far back as the 1960s.