Bill Joy

William Nelson Joy
Born	William Nelson Joy (1954-11-08) November 8, 1954 Farmington Hills, Michigan, U.S.
Occupation(s)	Computer engineer, venture capitalist
Years active	1970s–present
Known for	Co-founder of Sun Microsystems, BSD UNIX development, creator of vi editor, author of "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us"

William Nelson Joy (born November 8, 1954) is a prominent American computer engineer and venture capitalist. In 1982, he co-established Sun Microsystems alongside Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, and Andy Bechtolsheim, where he held the positions of Chief Scientist and Chief Technology Officer until 2003.

Joy played a crucial role in the advancement of BSD UNIX during his graduate studies at the Berkeley campus and is credited with creating the influential vi text editor. He also authored the notable 2000 essay titled "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us", which voiced apprehensions about future technological developments.

In recognition of his significant contributions to operating systems and networking software, he was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 1999.

Early career

Originating from Farmington Hills, Michigan, Joy completed his undergraduate studies with a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering at the University of Michigan. He then earned a Master of Science in electrical engineering and computer science from Berkeley in 1979.

While part of Berkeley's Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG), he was actively involved in the creation of the BSD variant of Unix. Beginning with work on a Pascal compiler originally developed by Ken Thompson, Joy later enhanced the Unix kernel and oversaw BSD releases. Among his notable achievements are the development of the ex and vi editors as well as the C shell. Although stories circulate that he developed vi over a single weekend, Joy has refuted such claims. Certain assertions regarding his rapid rewriting of the BSD kernel have also been overstated.

In 1980, Joy created cat -v, a utility designed to render nonprinting characters visible; however, this tool was criticized by Rob Pike and Brian W. Kernighan for conflicting with Unix design principles.

During the early 1980s, when DARPA contracted Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) to integrate TCP/IP into Berkeley Unix, Joy rejected BBN's implementation due to concerns about its quality. Instead, he developed his own high-performance TCP/IP stack. According to John Gage:

This narrative has been challenged by Rob Gurwitz from BBN.

Sun Microsystems

After six months since its founding, Joy became Sun Microsystems’ sixteenth employee and a full co-founder in 1982. At Sun, he contributed significantly to projects such as the Network File System (NFS), SPARC microprocessors, the Java programming language, Jini/JavaSpaces, and JXTA.

In recognition of his work on Berkeley UNIX Operating System, Joy was honored with the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1986.

Sun Microsystems announced Joy’s departure on September 9, 2003; at that time, he indicated that he was taking time off to evaluate future opportunities without any immediate plans.

Post-Sun activities

In 1999, Joy partnered with former Sun colleagues Andy Bechtolsheim and Roy Thiele-Sardiña to establish HighBAR Ventures, a venture capital firm. By January 2005, he had joined Kleiner Perkins as a partner focusing on investments in green energy sectors despite not having formal qualifications in that field. He described his investment philosophy as starting from the assumption that promising concepts are valid.

Joy was inducted as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum in 2011 for his foundational work on BSD Unix and for co-founding Sun Microsystems.

Technology concerns

In the year 2000, Joy attracted significant attention through his Wired article titled "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us", in which he presented a perspective aligned with neo-Luddite concerns. He argued that breakthroughs in genetic engineering and nanotechnology could threaten humanity's very existence. Joy cautioned that intelligent robots might soon exceed human capabilities both intellectually and socially. Rather than participating in an escalating arms race between harmful uses and defensive innovations such as benevolent nano-machines counteracting malicious ones, Joy champions a complete abandonment of GNR (genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics) technologies. This comprehensive call for relinquishment faced opposition from technologists like Ray Kurzweil, who supports selective relinquishment combined with ethical oversight.

Joy’s apprehensions stemmed from a conversation with Kurzweil, where he was taken aback by the fact that many serious scientists acknowledged these dangers but did not exhibit the urgency to tackle them. This encounter led Joy to further explore the scientific community’s stance and fueled his sustained commitment to addressing these risks.

Despite his warnings, Joy remains active as a venture capitalist investing in companies developing GNR technologies. He has also established a specialized venture fund aimed at countering pandemic threats such as H5N1 avian influenza and biological warfare.

Management perspective

Chris Anderson, in his 2013 book Makers, attributes the formulation of "Joy's law" to Bill Joy: "Regardless of who you are, most of the smartest individuals work for someone else." This observation underscores a corporate challenge where organizations often recruit solely from their internal talent pools rather than seeking out the absolute best candidates externally. Joy’s principle builds upon Friedrich Hayek’s idea that competition from outside sources can outperform a company's internal expertise.

Computing perspective

Back in 1983, Joy introduced a computing-related version of "Joy's law," which asserts that the maximum computer speed doubles every year, mathematically expressed as:

<math>S = 2^{Y-1984},</math>

where represents peak speed measured in MIPS for the year .

External links

• An Introduction to Display Editing with Vi
• Bill Joy, video excerpts at Big Picture TV
• Selected passages from a 1999 Linux Magazine interview on vi development
• NerdTV interview (video, audio, transcript) - June 30, 2005
• The Six Webs, 10 Years On - MIT Emerging Technologies presentation, September 29, 2005
• Bill Joy at Dropping Knowledge, replies to 100 questions during Berlin event, 2006
• Computer History Museum, Sun Founders Panel, January 11, 2006