Bill Joy | |
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%2c_2003-01_(cropped).jpg) Joy in 2003 | |
| Born | William Nelson Joy (1954-11-08)November 8, 1954 (age 71) |
| Education | University of Michigan (BS) University of California, Berkeley (MS) |
| Known for | BSD • vi • csh • chroot • TCP/IP driver • co-founder ofSun Microsystems • Java • SPARC • Solaris • NFS • Why The Future Doesn't Need Us |
| Children | 2 |
| Awards |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Academic advisors | Bob Fabry |
William Nelson Joy (born November 8, 1954) is an Americancomputer engineer andventure capitalist. He co-foundedSun Microsystems in 1982 along withScott McNealy,Vinod Khosla, andAndy Bechtolsheim, and served as Chief Scientist and CTO at the company until 2003.
He played an integral role in the early development ofBSD UNIX while being a graduate student atBerkeley,[1] and he is the original author of thevi text editor. He also wrote the 2000 essay "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us", in which he expressed deep concerns over the development of modern technologies.
Joy was elected a member of theNational Academy of Engineering (1999) for contributions to operating systems and networking software.[2]
Joy was born in the Detroit suburb ofFarmington Hills, Michigan, to William Joy, a school vice-principal and counselor, and Ruth Joy. He earned aBachelor of Science inelectrical engineering from theUniversity of Michigan and aMaster of Science inelectrical engineering andcomputer science from theUniversity of California, Berkeley, in 1979.[3]
While a graduate student at Berkeley, he worked for Fabry'sComputer Systems Research Group (CSRG) on theBerkeley Software Distribution (BSD) version of theUnix operating system. He initially worked on aPascal compiler left at Berkeley byKen Thompson, who had been visiting the university when Joy had just started his graduate work.[4]
He later moved on to improving the Unixkernel, and also handled BSD distributions.[4] Some of his most notable contributions were theex andvi editors and theC shell. Joy's prowess as a computer programmer is legendary, with an oft-told anecdote that he wrote the vi editor in a weekend. Joy denies this assertion.[5] A few of his other accomplishments have also been sometimes exaggerated;Eric Schmidt, CEO ofNovell at the time, inaccurately reported during an interview inPBS's documentaryNerds 2.0.1 that Joy had personally rewritten the BSD kernel in a weekend.[6] In 1980, he also wrotecat -v,[7][8] about whichRob Pike andBrian W. Kernighan wrote that it went againstUnix philosophy.[9]
According to aSalon article, during the early 1980s,DARPA had contracted the companyBolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) to addTCP/IP to Berkeley UNIX. Joy had been instructed to plug BBN's stack into Berkeley Unix, but he refused to do so, as he had a low opinion of BBN's TCP/IP. So, Joy wrote his own high-performance TCP/IP stack. According toJohn Gage:
BBN had a big contract to implement TCP/IP, but their stuff didn't work, and grad student Joy's 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.[10]
Rob Gurwitz, who was working at BBN at the time, disputes this version of events.[10]
In 1982, after the firm had been going for six months, Joy, Sun's sixteenth employee, was brought in with full co-founder status atSun Microsystems.[11] At Sun, Joy was an inspiration for the development ofNFS, theSPARC microprocessors,[12] theJava programming language,Jini/JavaSpaces,[13] andJXTA.[14]
In 1986, Joy was awarded aGrace Murray Hopper Award by theACM for his work on the Berkeley UNIX Operating System.[15]
On September 9, 2003, Sun announced Joy was leaving the company and that he "is taking time to consider his next move and has no definite plans".[16][17][18][19][20]
In 1999, Joy co-founded a venture capital firm, HighBAR Ventures, with two Sun colleagues,Andy Bechtolsheim and Roy Thiele-Sardiña. In January 2005 he was named a partner in venture capital firmKleiner Perkins. There, Joy has made several investments in green energy industries, even though he does not have any credentials in the field.[21] He once said, "My method is to look at something that seems like a good idea and assume it's true".[22]
In 2011, he was inducted as a Fellow of theComputer History Museum for his work on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix system and the co-founding of Sun Microsystems.[23]
In 2000, Joy gained notoriety with the publication of his article inWired magazine, "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us", in which he declared, in what some have described as a "neo-Luddite" position,[24] that he was convinced that growing advances ingenetic engineering andnanotechnology would bringrisks to humanity. He argued that intelligentrobots would replace humanity, at the very least in intellectual and social dominance, in the relatively near future. He supports and promotes the idea of abandonment of GNR (genetics, nanotechnology, androbotics) technologies, instead of going into anarms race between negative uses of the technology and defense against those negative uses (good nano-machines patrolling and defending againstGrey goo "bad" nano-machines). This stance of broad relinquishment was criticized by technologists such astechnological-singularity thinkerRay Kurzweil, who instead advocates fine-grained relinquishment and ethical guidelines.[25][26] Joy was also criticized byThe American Spectator, which characterized Joy's essay as a (possibly unwitting) rationale forstatism.[26]
A bar-room discussion of these technologies withRay Kurzweil started to set Joy's thinking along this path. He states in his essay that during the conversation, he became surprised that other serious scientists were considering such possibilities likely, and even more astounded at what he felt was a lack of consideration of the contingencies. After bringing the subject up with a few more acquaintances, he states that he was further alarmed by what he felt was that although many people considered these futures possible or probable, that very few of them shared as serious a concern for the dangers as he seemed to. This concern led to his in-depth examination of the issue and the positions of others in the scientific community on it, and eventually, to his current activities regarding it.
Despite this, he is aventure capitalist, investing inGNR technology companies.[27] He has also raised a specialty venture fund to address the dangers of pandemic diseases, such as the H5N1avian influenza and biological weapons.
In his 2013 bookMakers, authorChris Anderson credited Joy with establishing "Joy's law" based on a quip: "No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else [other than you]."[28] His argument was that companies use an inefficient process by not hiring the best employees, only those they are able to hire. His "law" was a continuation ofFriedrich Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society" and warned that the competition outside of a company would always have the potential to be greater than the company itself.[29]
Joy devised a formula in 1983, also calledJoy's law, stating that the peak computer speed doubles each year and thus is given by a simple function of time. Specifically,
in whichS is the peak computer speed attained during yearY, expressed inMIPS.[30]
case 'v':
cat therefore shouldn't transform its input
he was Sun's sixteenth employee
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