Bill Joy

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William Nelson Joy (born November 8, 1954) is an American computer scientist. He founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as chief scientist at the company until 2003. He played an integral role in the early development of BSD UNIX while graduate student at Berkeley, and he is the original author of text editor vi. He also wrote a 2000 essay Why the Future Does not Require Us , in which he expressed his deep concern over the development of modern technology.

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Joy was born on the outskirts of Detroit Farmington Hills, Michigan, to William Joy, vice principal and school counselor, and Ruth Joy. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan and a Master of Science degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1979.

As a UC Berkeley graduate student, he works for Fabry's Computer Systems Research Group CSRG on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) version of the Unix operating system. He originally worked on Pascal's compiler which was abandoned at Berkeley by Ken Thompson, who had visited the University when Joy had just started his graduation job.

He then moved to fix the Unix kernel, and also handled the BSD distribution. Some of the most prominent contributions are ex and vi and csh editor. Joy's prowess as a computer programmer is legendary, with anecdotes often said that he wrote vi editors on weekends. Joy denied this statement. His other accomplishments are also sometimes exaggerated; Eric Schmidt, CEO of Novell at the time, reported inaccurately during an interview in the PBS documentary Nerds 2.0.1 that Joy had personally rewritten the BSD kernel over the weekend.

According to Salon articles, during the early 1980s, DARPA had contracted Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) companies to add TCP/IP to Berkeley UNIX. Joy had been instructed to stick a pile of biofuel to Berkeley Unix, but he refused to do so, because he had a low opinion about TCP/IP BBN. So Joy writes for himself a high-performance TCP/IP array. According to John Gage,

BBN has a big contract to implement TCP/IP, but their stuff is not working, and Joy's graduate student works. So they held a big meeting and this graduate student in a T-shirt appeared, and they said, "How do you do this?" And Bill said, "It's so simple - you read the protocol and write the code."

Rob Gurwitz, who worked at BBN at the time, denied this version of the show.

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Sun Microsystems

In 1982, after the company has been running for six months, Joy was brought in full co-founder status at Sun Microsystems. At Sun, Joy is an inspiration for the development of NFS, SPARC microprocessors, Java programming languages, Jini/JavaSpaces, and JXTA.

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

On September 9, 2003, Sun announced that Joy had left the company and that he "took time to consider the next step and did not have a definite plan".

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Post-Sun

In 1999, Joy founded a venture capital company, HighBAR Ventures, with two Sun colleagues, Andreas von Bechtolsheim and Roy Thiele-SardiÃƒÆ' Ã‚ Â± a. In January 2005 he was appointed as a partner in venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. There, Joy has made some investments in the green energy industry, even though he has no credentials on the ground. He once said, "My method is to look at something that looks like a good idea and thinks it's true".

In 2011, he was appointed Fellow of the Computer History Museum for his work on the Unix Berkeley Software (BSD) system and the establishment of Sun Microsystems.

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Technology Concerns

In 2000, Joy became famous for the publication of his article on Wired Magazine , Why the Future Does not Require Us , where it states, in what some people describe as "neo -Luddite ", that he believes that the ever-increasing advances in genetic engineering and nanotechnology will carry risks to humanity. He argues that intelligent robots will replace humanity, at least in intellectual and social dominance, in the relatively near future. He supports and promotes the idea of â€‹â€‹abandoning GNR technology (genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics), instead of getting into the arms race between negative use of technology and defense against negative usage (both nano-engine patrolling and defending against the nano-goo "bad" ). This widespread disposition was criticized by technologists such as the technological thinker-singularity of Ray Kurzweil, who in fact favored the release and subtle ethical guidance. Joy was also criticized by The American Spectator, who characterized Joy's essay as an (perhaps unnoticed) reason for statism.

A space-bar discussion of this technology with Ray Kurzweil began to organize Joy's thoughts along this path. He stated in his essay that during the conversation, he became surprised that other serious scientists were considering such a possibility, and even more shocked at what he felt was a lack of consideration about the possibilities. Having brought the subject with some more acquaintances, he states that he is more worried about what he feels is the fact that although many people consider this future as possible or possible, that very few of them share the same serious attention to danger as it seems to him. This concern has led to an in-depth examination of the problems and positions of others in the scientific community above it, and finally, for its current activities on the subject.

Nonetheless, he is a venture capitalist, investing in GNR technology companies. He has also raised special venture funds to address the dangers of pandemic diseases, such as H5N1 bird flu and biological weapons.

Bill Joy and Paul Saffo | Bill Joy and Paul Saffo at Japan Dâ¦ | Flickr

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Joy's Law

In his 2013 Makers author Chris Anderson praised Joy for developing "Joy's theory" based on the proposition: "No matter who you are, most people are smartest to work for others [other than you]." His argument is that companies use inefficient processes by not hiring the best employees, only those who can afford to hire. His "law" is a continuation of Friedrich Hayek "The Use of Knowledge in Society" and warns that competition outside the company will always have the potential to become greater than the company itself.