Bill Joy

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 and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as chief scientist at the company until 2003. Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... November 8 is the 312th day of the year (313th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 53 days remaining. ... Year 1954 (MCMLIV) was a common year (link will display full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Sun Microsystems, Inc. ... Year 1982 (MCMLXXXII) was a common year starting on Friday (link displays the 1982 Gregorian calendar). ... Vinod Khosla (born January 28, 1955 in Poona[1]) is an Indian venture capitalist. ... Scott McNealy holding Suns new UltraSPARC T1 processor, unveiled on November 14, 2005. ... Andreas von Bechtolsheim Andy (Andreas) von Bechtolsheim (born in Germany in 1956) co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 with Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy, and Scott McNealy. ... Year 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday (link displays 2003 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ...

Early career

After growing up in rural 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. [1] Official language(s) None (English, de-facto) Capital Lansing Largest city Detroit Area  Ranked 11th  - Total 97,990 sq mi (253,793 km²)  - Width 239 miles (385 km)  - Length 491 miles (790 km)  - % water 41. ... Electrical Engineers design power systems… … and complex electronic circuits. ... The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (U of M, U-M or simply Michigan) is a coeducational public research university in the state of Michigan, and one of the foremost universities in the United States. ... EECS (sometimes pronounced eeks) is an abbreviation for Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. ... The University of California, Berkeley (also known as Cal, UC Berkeley, UCB, or simply Berkeley) is a prestigious, public, coeducational university situated in the foothills of Berkeley, California to the east of San Francisco Bay, overlooking the Golden Gate and its bridge. ...

He was 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. Apple Computer has also based much of the Mac OS X operating system line on BSD technology. Some of his most notable contributions were TCP/IP, the vi editor, NFS, and the csh shell. He had rewritten BSD in one weekend, according to Nerds 2.0.1. Filiation of Unix and Unix-like systems Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX®) is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy. ... Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD, sometimes called Berkeley Unix) is the Unix derivative distributed by the University of California, Berkeley, starting in the 1970s. ... FreeBSD is a Unix-like free operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) branch through the 386BSD and 4. ... NetBSD is a freely redistributable, open source version of the Unix-like BSD computer operating system. ... OpenBSD is a Unix-like computer operating system descended from Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix derivative developed at the University of California, Berkeley. ... Apple Inc. ... Mac OS X (official IPA pronunciation: ) is a line of proprietary, graphical operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. ... The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the core protocols of the Internet protocol suite, often simply referred to as TCP/IP. Using TCP, applications on networked hosts can create connections to one another, over which they can exchange streams of data using Stream Sockets. ... The correct title of this article is vi. ... Network File System (NFS) is a network file system protocol originally developed by Sun Microsystems in 1984, allowing a user on a client computer to access files over a network as easily as if the network devices were attached to its local disks. ... The C shell (csh) is a Unix shell developed by Bill Joy for the BSD Unix system. ... Nerds 2. ...

Sun

In 1982, Joy co-founded Sun Microsystems. Year 1982 (MCMLXXXII) was a common year starting on Friday (link displays the 1982 Gregorian calendar). ... Sun Microsystems, Inc. ...

According to a Salon.com article, during the early 1980s DARPA had contracted 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.'" [2] Others dispute this version of events. Salon. ... The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technology for use by the military. ... BBN Technologies (originally Bolt Beranek and Newman) is a high technology company that provides research and development services. ... John Burdette Gage (born 1942), is one of the original employees of Sun Microsystems; in 1982 he joined Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, Bill Joy, Andy Bechtolsheim,and fifteen others to found Sun. ...

In 1986, Joy was awarded a Grace Murray Hopper Award by the ACM for his work on the Berkeley UNIX Operating System. Year 1986 (MCMLXXXVI) was a common year starting on Wednesday (link displays 1986 Gregorian calendar). ... Although many awards have added Grace Hoppers name to them since her death in 1992, the original Grace Murray Hopper Awards have been awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) since 1971. ... The Association for Computing Machinery, or ACM, was founded in 1947 as the worlds first scientific and educational computing society. ...

Joy was also a primary figure in the development of the SPARC microprocessors, the Java programming language, and Jini / JavaSpaces. Sun UltraSPARC II Microprocessor Sun UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara 8 Core) SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a RISC microprocessor instruction set architecture originally designed in 1985 by Sun Microsystems. ... Java is a programming language originally developed by Sun Microsystems and released in 1995. ... Jiniâ„¢ (pronounced like genie) is a network architecture for the construction of distributed systems where scale, rate of change and complexity of interactions within and between networks are extremely important and cannot be satisfactorily addressed by existing technologies. ... JavaSpaces is a service specification. ...

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". is the 252nd day of the year (253rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday (link displays 2003 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ...

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 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 (Blue Goo "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 lead to his in-depth examination of the issue and others positions on it, and eventually, to his current activities regarding it. 2000 (MM) was a leap year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Wired is a full-color monthly magazine and on-line periodical published in San Francisco, California since March 1993. ... Why the future doesnt need us is an article by Bill Joy, Chief Scientist at Sun Microsystems. ... The neutrality of this article is disputed. ... An iconic image of genetic engineering; this autoluminograph from 1986 of a glowing transgenic tobacco plant bearing the luciferase gene, illustrating the possibilities of genetic engineering. ... Buckminsterfullerene C60, also known as the buckyball, is the simplest of the carbon structures known as fullerenes. ... In futurology, an existential risk is a risk that is both global and terminal. ... ASIMO, a humanoid robot manufactured by Honda. ... GNR may be: Railways: Great Northern Railway of Great Britain. ... DNA, the molecular basis for inheritance. ... Buckminsterfullerene C60, also known as the buckyball, is the simplest of the carbon structures known as fullerenes. ... Robotics is the science and technology of robots, their design, manufacture, and application. ... Grey goo refers to a hypothetical end-of-the-world scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating robots consume all living matter on Earth while building more of themselves (a scenario known as ecophagy). ... When plotted on a logarithmic graph, 15 separate lists of paradigm shifts for key events in human history show an exponential trend. ... Dr. Raymond Kurzweil (born February 12, 1948) is a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic musical keyboards. ...

Since writing this essay he has become a venture capitalist, and he and his firm have invested in GNR technology companies, and raised a specialty venture fund to address the dangers of Pandemic diseases, such as H5N1 Avian flu and Bioterrorist threats. In 2006, he was awarded the Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award for developing this biosafety venture fund and other actions. Venture capital is a general term to describe financing for startup and early stage businesses as well as businesses in turn around situations. ... GNR may be: Railways: Great Northern Railway of Great Britain. ...

Post-Sun activities

In 1999 Joy co-founded a venture capital firm, HighBAR Ventures, with two Sun colleagues: Andreas Bechtolsheim and Roy Thiele-Sardina. In January 2005 he was named a partner in venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. Bill Joy is divorced and lives with his two children in Aspen, Colorado. He has once said, "My method is to look at something that seems like a good idea and assume it's true" (see [3]). Year 1999 (MCMXCIX) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display full 1999 Gregorian calendar). ... Andy (Andreas) von Bechtolsheim (born in Germany in 1955) co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 with Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy, and Scott McNealy. ... Year 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers is a major Sand Hill Road venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. ... View south along Galena Street in downtown Aspen. ...

External links

• Bill Joy at Dropping Knowledge View Bill Joy's answers to the 100 questions at Dropping Knowledge's Table of Free Voices event in Berlin, 2006.
• Big Picture TV Free video clips of Bill Joy
• Software Isn't Complete Unless It's Secure, BusinessWeek, September 26, 2006
• BSD Unix: Power to the people, from the code - Salon article
• Why the future doesn't need us, Wired, April 2000
• Interview Wired, December 2003
• Bill Joy's Hi-Tech Warning
• Bill Joy, techcast.ddj.com
• Co-founder Joy to leave Sun, news.com, September 9, 2003
• Joy After Sun, interview with Brent Schlender for Fortune, September 29, 2003
• Internet archive of biography from Sun Microsystems in 2003
• CNet Interview: Talking tech with Bill Joy - 31 March 2005
• NerdTV interview (video, audio, and transcript available) - 30 June 2005
• An Introduction to Display Editing with Vi
• The Six Webs, 10 Years On - speech at MIT Emerging Technologies conference
• Computer History Museum, 11-Jan-2006: Sun Founders Panel
  • Sun Feature Story: The Fab Four Reunites (webcast of the event)
• Joy's University of Michigan Profile
• Nerds 2.0.1