William Nelson Joy (born Feb 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.
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] Joy’s PhD. advisor was Robert Fabry.
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 the vi editor, NFS, and the csh shell.
Joy’s prowess as a computer programmer is legendary, with an oft-told anecdote that he wrote vi in a weekend (not so, says Joy). The mythopoesis continues, with Eric Schmidt, at the time CEO of Novell, while interviewed in PBS’s documentary Nerds 2.0.1, inflating the accomplishment to Bill Joy having rewritten BSD 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. [2]
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”.
