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Bill Joy
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William Nelson Joy (born Nov 8, 1954), commonly known as Bill Joy, is an American computer scientist. Joy co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtolsheim and Vaughan Pratt, and served as chief scientist at the company until 2003. He has two children, Hayden and Maddie.
r growing up in suburban Detroit, Michigan, Bill Joy received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan and his M.S. in EECS from UC Berkeley in 1979.
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William Nelson Joy (born Nov 8, 1954), commonly known as Bill Joy, is an American computer scientist. Joy co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtolsheim and Vaughan Pratt, and served as chief scientist at the company until 2003. He has two children, Hayden and Maddie.
Early career
After growing up in suburban Detroit, Michigan, Bill Joy received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan and his M.S. in EECS from UC Berkeley in 1979. Joy's PhD advisor was Robert Fabry.
As a UC berkeley Grad Student Bill worked for Fabry's Computer Systems Research Group CSRG in managing the BSD support and rollout where many claim he was largely responsible for managing the authorship of BSD UNIX, from which sprang many modern forms of UNIX, including FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Apple Computer has based much of the Mac OS X kernel and OS Services on the BSD technology.
Some of his most notable contributions were the vi editor, NFS, and csh. 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.
Eric Schmidt, CEO of Novell at the time, continued the mythopoesis during an interview in PBS's documentary Nerds 2.0.1, inflating Bill Joy's accomplishments as having personally rewritten the BSD kernel in a weekend.
Sun
In 1982, Joy co-founded Sun Microsystems.
According to a Salon.com article, during the early 1980s DARPA had contracted the company Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) to add TCP/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 to John Gage,
"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.'"
Rob Gurwitz, who was working at BBN at the time, disputes 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, Jini / JavaSpaces and JXTA.
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".
Technology concerns
In 2000 Joy 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 that growing advances in genetic engineering and nanotechnology would bring risks to humanity. He argued that intelligent robots would replace humanity, at the very least in intellectual and social dominance, in the relatively near future. He advocates a position of relinquishment of GNR (Genetics, Nanotechnology, and Robotics) technologies, rather than going into an arms race between negative uses of the technology and defense against those negative uses (good nano-machines patrolling and defending against Grey Goo "bad" nano-machines). A bar-room discussion of these technologies with inventor and Technological Singularity thinker Ray Kurzweil started to set his 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 considerations 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 the fact 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 other's positions on it, and eventually, to his current activities regarding it.
Despite this he has become a venture capitalist, investing in GNR technology companies. He has also raised a specialty venture fund to address the dangers of Pandemic diseases, such as H5N1 Avian influenza and Bioterrorist threats. In 2006, he was awarded the Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award for developing this biosafety venture fund and other actions.
Post-Sun activities
In 1999 Joy co-founded a venture capital firm, HighBAR Ventures, with two Sun colleagues: Andreas Bechtolsheim and Roy Thiele-Sardiņa. In January 2005 he was named a partner in venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He has once said, "My method is to look at something that seems like a good idea and assume it's true".
External links
- View Bill Joy's answers to the 100 questions at Dropping Knowledge's Table of Free Voices event in Berlin, 2006.
- Free video clips of Bill Joy
- - Salon article
- , Wired, April 2000
- Wired, December 2003
- , techcast.ddj.com
- , news.com, September 9 2003
- , interview with Brent Schlender for Fortune, September 29 2003
- - 31 March 2005
- (video, audio, and transcript available) - 30 June 2005
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