William Nelson Joy was born on November 8,1954 and is an American computer engineer and venture capitalist.
21 Facts About Bill Joy
2.
Bill Joy co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as Chief Scientist and CTO at the company until 2003.
3.
Bill Joy played an integral role in the early development of BSD UNIX while being a graduate student at Berkeley, and he is the original author of the vi text editor.
4.
Bill Joy wrote the 2000 essay "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us", in which he expressed deep concerns over the development of modern technologies.
5.
Bill Joy was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to operating systems and networking software.
6.
Bill Joy earned a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan and a Master of Science in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1979.
7.
Bill Joy initially worked on a Pascal compiler left at Berkeley by Ken Thompson, who had been visiting the university when Joy had just started his graduate work.
8.
Bill Joy later moved on to improving the Unix kernel, and handled BSD distributions.
9.
Bill Joy wrote cat -v in 1980 which Rob Pike and Brian W Kernighan wrote went against Unix philosophy.
10.
In 1982, after the firm had been going for six months, Bill Joy was brought in with full co-founder status at Sun Microsystems.
11.
In 1986, Bill Joy was awarded a Grace Murray Hopper Award by the ACM for his work on the Berkeley UNIX Operating System.
12.
On September 9,2003, Sun announced Bill Joy was leaving the company and that he "is taking time to consider his next move and has no definite plans".
13.
In 1999, Bill Joy co-founded a venture capital firm, HighBAR Ventures, with two Sun colleagues, Andy Bechtolsheim and Roy Thiele-Sardina.
14.
Bill Joy once said, "My method is to look at something that seems like a good idea and assume it's true".
15.
In 2000, Bill Joy gained notoriety with the publication of his article in Wired magazine, "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us", in which he declared, in what some have described as a "neo-Luddite" position, that he was convinced that growing advances in genetic engineering and nanotechnology would bring risks to humanity.
16.
Bill Joy argued that intelligent robots would replace humanity, at the very least in intellectual and social dominance, in the relatively near future.
17.
Bill Joy was criticized by The American Spectator, which characterized Bill Joy's essay as a rationale for statism.
18.
Bill Joy states in his essay that during the conversation, he became surprised that other serious scientists were considering such possibilities likely, and even more astounded at what he felt was a lack of consideration of the contingencies.
19.
Bill Joy has raised a specialty venture fund to address the dangers of pandemic diseases, such as the H5N1 avian influenza and biological weapons.
20.
Bill Joy's "law" was a continuation of Friedrich Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society" and warned that the competition outside of a company would always have the potential to be greater than the company itself.
21.
In terms of computing, Bill Joy devised a formula in 1983, called Joy's law, stating that the peak computer speed doubles each year and thus is given by a simple function of time.