= Bill_Joy =

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= Bill_Joy =
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Introduction
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William Nelson Joy (born November 8, 1954) is an American computer
engineer and venture capitalist. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in
1982 along with Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, and Andy Bechtolsheim,
and served as Chief Scientist and CTO at the company until 2003.

He played an integral role in the early development of BSD UNIX while
being a graduate student at Berkeley, and he is the original author of
the vi 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 the National Academy of Engineering (1999)
for contributions to operating systems and networking software.

Early career
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Joy was born in the Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills, Michigan, to
William Joy, a school vice-principal and counselor, and Ruth Joy. He
earned a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from the
University of Michigan and a Master of Science in electrical
engineering and computer science from the University of California,
Berkeley, in 1979.

While a graduate student at Berkeley, he worked for Bob Fabry's
Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) on the Berkeley Software
Distribution (BSD) version of the Unix operating system. He initially
worked on a Pascal compiler left at Berkeley by Ken Thompson, who had
been visiting the university when Joy had just started his graduate
work.

He later moved on to improving the Unix kernel, and also handled BSD
distributions. Some of his most notable contributions were the ex and
vi editors and the C 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. A few of his other accomplishments
have also been sometimes exaggerated; Eric Schmidt, CEO of Novell at
the time, inaccurately reported during an interview in PBS's
documentary 'Nerds 2.0.1' that Joy had personally rewritten the BSD
kernel in a weekend.
In 1980, he also wrote cat -v, about which Rob Pike and Brian W.
Kernighan wrote that it went against Unix philosophy.

According to a 'Salon' 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:

Rob Gurwitz, who was working at BBN at the time, disputes this version
of events.

Sun Microsystems
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In 1982, after the firm had been going for six months, Joy, Sun's
sixteenth employee, was brought in with full co-founder status at Sun
Microsystems. At Sun, Joy was an inspiration for the development of
NFS, the SPARC microprocessors, the Java programming language,
Jini/JavaSpaces, and JXTA.

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

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".

Post-Sun activities
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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 firm Kleiner
Perkins. There, Joy has made several investments in green energy
industries, even though he does not have any credentials in the field.
He once said, "My method is to look at something that seems like a
good idea and assume it's true".

In 2011, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum
for his work on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix system
and the co-founding of Sun Microsystems.

Technology concerns
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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
supports and promotes the idea of abandonment of GNR (genetics,
nanotechnology, and robotics) technologies, instead of 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). This stance of broad
relinquishment was criticized by technologists such as
technological-singularity thinker Ray Kurzweil, who instead advocates
fine-grained relinquishment and ethical guidelines. Joy was also
criticized by 'The American Spectator', which characterized Joy's
essay as a (possibly unwitting) rationale for statism.

A bar-room discussion of these technologies with Ray 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 a venture capitalist, investing in technology
companies. He has also raised a specialty venture fund to address the
dangers of pandemic diseases, such as the H5N1 avian influenza and
biological weapons.

Of management
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In his 2013 book 'Makers', author Chris 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]." 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 of Friedrich 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.

Of computing
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Joy devised a formula in 1983, also called 'Joy's law', stating that
the peak computer speed doubles each year and thus is given by a
simple function of time. Specifically,
:
in which is the peak computer speed attained during year , expressed
in MIPS.

External links
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*
*

*
* [https://ex-vi.sourceforge.net/viin/paper.html An Introduction to
Display Editing with Vi]
*
[https://web.archive.org/web/20120507165453/http://www.bigpicture.tv/speakers/bill_joy
Bill Joy], video clips at Big Picture TV
*
[https://web.archive.org/web/20140603174753/https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/09/11/bill_joys_greatest_gift/
Excerpts from a 1999 Linux Magazine interview regarding the
development of vi]
*
[https://web.archive.org/web/20160316234314/http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/transcripts/003.html
NerdTV interview] (video, audio, and transcript available) - 30 June
2005
* [http://video.mit.edu/watch/the-six-webs-10-years-on-9110/ The Six
Webs, 10 Years On - speech at MIT Emerging Technologies conference],
September 29, 2005
*
[http://www.droppingknowledge.org/bin/user/listitems/answer_view/6439.page
Bill Joy at Dropping Knowledge], his answers to the 100 questions at
Dropping Knowledge's Table of Free Voices event in Berlin, 2006.
*
[https://web.archive.org/web/20110420215435/http://www.computerhistory.org/events/index.php?id=1120598654
Computer History Museum, Sun Founders Panel], January 11, 2006

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Original Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Joy