Bill Joy

Bill Joy (born November 8, 1954, Farmington Hills, Michigan, U.S.) is an American software developer, entrepreneur, and cofounder of the computer manufacturer Sun Microsystems. Joy devised a version of the UNIX operating system, Berkeley UNIX, that used the TCP/IP networking language, which placed UNIX servers at the forefront of the Internet revolution and the open-source movement. He also collaborated on both the Java programming language and the Jini networking system, which fostered connectability between the Internet and household appliances.

As a child, Joy wanted to be a ham radio operator, but his parents disapproved because of their concerns about his antisocial tendencies. Joy excelled in mathematics and graduated from high school at age 16. He enrolled as an electrical engineering undergraduate at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he worked on one of the earliest parallel-processing supercomputers. After graduating, he went to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1975 to pursue a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science. He quickly gained notice for helping to update the UNIX operating system that was running the school’s Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) computers. He compiled the improvements on computer tape and sold copies for $50. The next year, he performed more advanced fixes to newer DEC VAX computers, this time selling his work for $300. Soon, hundreds of orders for his “Berkeley UNIX” began rolling in. He responded in 1977 by creating Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which distributed Berkeley UNIX’s source code for free, allowing other programmers to learn and improve on the software. It was a pioneering moment in what is now called the open-source movement.

In 1978 Joy and his UNIX team received funding from the federal government to devise software for the VAX computer that would allow it to link to the ARPANET network, a precursor of the Internet. His team beat DEC’s own programmers in the bid to work for the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

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In 1982 a team led by entrepreneur Scott McNealy recruited Joy for a new start-up company that proposed to create a high-powered version of UNIX for a small cheap desktop-computer workstation. Built by Andy Bechtolsheim, a member of McNealy’s team, the computer was called the Stanford University Network workstation, or S.U.N. for short, and the company eventually became Sun Microsystems. Joy led Sun’s technical strategy, spearheading its open-systems philosophy. He designed Sun’s Network File System (NFS) and codesigned the SPARC microprocessor. In 1991 he designed the basic pipeline of the UltraSparc-I and its multimedia processing features. He drove the initial strategy for Java, codesigned Java processor architectures, and coauthored its programming-language specifications, helping to create a new object-oriented-programming language. Upon its 1995 release, Java was almost immediately integrated into early versions of the Netscape Navigator Web browser.

In 1997 U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton appointed Joy cochairman of the Presidential Information Technology Advisory Committee. The following year Joy was appointed Sun’s chief technologist, and he worked on new forms of distributed computing using Java and a related technology called Jini, which embedded slivers of tiny Java applications into devices such as printers and cell phones to enable Internet connectivity.

In April 2000 Wired magazine published a much-discussed essay by Joy titled “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” in which he argued that computer technology has the potential to destroy humanity. Joy believed that Moore’s law, a prediction that states that computer processing speed doubles every 18 months, would continue until about 2030 and would enable ultrapowerful computing with molecule-sized processors. Joy warned that robots, engineered organisms, and nanobots could become independent and self-replicating and might usurp humanity. Some writers criticized Joy’s essay as a panicky reaction to technological breakthroughs that humanity likely will not allow to slip out of control. Others argued that such words of caution must be heeded and compared Joy to doom-saying 18th-century sociologist Thomas Malthus.

(Read Thomas Malthus’s 1824 Britannica essay on population.)

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In 2003 Joy left Sun Microsystems with no definite plans. He became a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (later Kleiner Perkins), a venture capital firm, in 2005. There he helped develop the company’s strategy for funding technologies that addressed climate change and sustainability, such as renewable fuels, “green” power generation, and low-cost electrical-energy storage. He left the firm in 2014 and later worked for Water Street Capital.