Bill Joy: Encyclopedia - Bill Joy

Bill Joy

William Nelson Joy (born 1954), commonly known as Bill Joy, co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as chief scientist at the company until 2003.

Bill Joy - Early career

After growing up in rural Michigan Joy received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan and his M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley.

Bill Joy was the person largely responsible for the authorship of Berkeley UNIX, also known as BSD, from which spring many modern forms of UNIX, including FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Some of his most notable contributions were TCP/IP, the vi editor, NFS, and the csh shell.

Bill Joy - Sun

In 1983 he co-founded Sun Microsystems.

There is a story about him: DARPA had contracted BBN to add TCP/IP, devised by Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn, into Berkeley UNIX. Joy had been instructed to plug BBN's stack into Berkeley Unix. But Joy refused to do so. In his opinion, BBN's TCP/IP wasn't good enough. So he wrote his own high-performance TCP/IP stack.

As John Gage tells it, "BBN had a big contract to implement TCP/IP, but their stuff didn't work, and Joy's grad student stuff worked. So they had this big meeting and this grad student in a T-shirt shows up, and they said, 'How did you do this?' And Bill said, 'It's very simple -- you read the protocol and write the code.'" Others dispute this version of events.

In 1986, Joy was awarded a Grace Murray Hopper Award by the ACM for his work on the Berkeley UNIX Operating System.

Joy was also a primary figure in the development of the SPARC microprocessors, the Java programming language, and JINI.

On September 9, 2003 Sun announced that Bill Joy was leaving the company and that he "is taking time to consider his next move and has no definite plans".

Bill Joy - Technology fears

In 2000 he gained notoriety with the publication of his article in Wired Magazine, "Why the future doesn't need us", in which he declared, in what some have described as a "neo-Luddite" position, that he was convinced by the growing advances in genetic engineering and nanotechnology that intelligent robots would replace humanity, at the very least in intellectual and social dominance, in the relatively near future. One of those who he admitted had set him thinking along this path was Theodore Kaczynski, the anti-technology murderer known as the Unabomber.

Bill Joy - Post-Sun activities

In late 2003 Joy founded a capital venture firm, HighBar Ventures, with two Sun colleagues. In January 2005 he was named a partner in venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers.

Bill Joy is married and lives with his four children in Aspen, Colorado.

Bill Joy once said, "My method is to look at something that seems like a good idea and assume it's true." [1]

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Bill Joy", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki