Joy, Bill

1954–

Software Developer, Entrepreneur

As a creative mind bulldozing new pathways into the digital age, Bill Joy arguably ranks second in importance only to Microsoft's Bill Gates—and may in fact rank second to no one. Joy is one of the originators behind the open-source movement. As a student in his twenties, he devised a version of the Unix operating system (Berkeley Unix) that utilized the TCP/IP networking language, helping to place Unix servers at the forefront of the Internet revolution. He helped found Sun Microsystems, and helped invent both the Java programming language and the Jini networking system that he hopes one day will link everything from living-room lights to toasters and thermostats to the Internet and to each other.

Bill Joy was the eldest of three children growing up in Farmington Hills, Michigan. Early on, he wanted to be a ham radio operator, but his mother disapproved, worried about what she feared were her son's antisocial tendencies. His father, a business professor and stockbroker, felt the same concern, but his parents could not fail to notice the obvious gifts of a boy capable of memorizing the periodic table in a single evening at age 13.

Joy excelled in mathematics, and graduated from high school at age 15. He enrolled as an engineering undergraduate at the University of Michigan, where he worked on one of the earliest parallel-processing supercomputers. After graduating, he went to the University of California–Berkeley in 1975; he said that he made the choice to attend Berkeley because its relatively poor computer systems would force him to “be more ingenious.” Once at Berkeley, Joy quickly [Page 265]gained notice in the computing community for helping to spruce up the Unix operating systems that were running the school's Digital Equipment computers. He compiled the improvements on computer tape, and sold copies for $50. The next year, he performed more advanced fixes to newer Digital Equipment 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). BSD 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 went to work for the federal government. His Unix team, which had beaten out Digital Equipment's own programmers in a bid to work for the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), was assigned the task of devising software for the VAX computer that would allow it to link to the fledgling Internet, then still known as ARPANET.

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 that a member of McNealy's team had created. The computer was called the Stanford University Network workstation, or S.U.N. for short. The company built on it eventually became Sun Microsystems.

Joy led Sun's technical strategy, spearheading its open systems philosophy. He designed Sun's Network File System (NFS) and co-designed the SPARC microprocessor at a time when most software programmers barely understood what microprocessors did. In 1991, he designed the basic pipeline of the UltraSparc-I and its multimedia processing features. He drove the initial strategy for Java, co-designed Java processor architectures, and co-authored its programming-language specifications, helping to create an important, simplified new object-oriented programming language. Upon its 1995 release, Java was almost immediately integrated into early versions of the Netscape Navigator Web browser.

...