Bill Joy

Joy grew up in Farmington Hills, Michigan, the son of a school vice-principal, earned an electrical engineering degree at Michigan, and went west to Berkeley for graduate work under Bob Fabry at the Computer Systems Research Group. He built a reputation there for marathon overnight coding sessions and for rewriting large parts of Unix more or less by himself: the vi and ex text editors, the C shell, and a high-performance TCP/IP networking stack he wrote from scratch rather than adopt an existing implementation. A persistent story claims he wrote vi in a single weekend; Joy has always denied it. He finished his master's degree in 1979, already one of the most capable systems programmers in the country.

Joy joined a startup called Sun Microsystems in 1982 as its sixteenth employee, alongside Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla and Andy Bechtolsheim, with full cofounder standing, and stayed as chief scientist for over two decades. He drove the Network File System, contributed to the SPARC processor architecture, and helped push the Java programming language into the mainstream after Sun acquired it. The Association for Computing Machinery gave him its Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1986, and the National Academy of Engineering elected him in 1999. He left Sun in September 2003, a year before Oracle would eventually absorb the company, and has spent the years since as a venture capitalist funding green-energy and biosecurity companies.

In 2000, Joy published an essay in Wired called "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," arguing that genetic engineering, nanotechnology and robotics could advance to the point of threatening human survival, and that entire fields of research should be abandoned rather than pursued carefully. It was a striking position for a man who had spent his career building the software infrastructure that made the internet's expansion possible in the first place. Critics, Ray Kurzweil prominent among them, argued for regulation and caution instead of relinquishment. Joy has never fully squared the argument with his own choices since: as a partner at Kleiner Perkins he has continued investing venture capital directly into the genetic and robotic technologies his essay urged the world to walk away from.

Joy is retired from operating companies but remains an active investor. The vi editor he wrote as a graduate student is still installed on nearly every Unix-like system on Earth, more than four decades after the code was written, likely the single longest-lived piece of software any one person in this book produced. The Computer History Museum made him a fellow in 2011. "Joy's Law," his observation that most of the smartest people work for someone else, entered management writing through Chris Anderson's 2013 book Makers and is now cited well beyond the software industry that coined it.

Bill Joy's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• vi and ex text editors invention
  Still shipped by default on nearly every Unix-like system 1976
• C shell (csh) invention
  A Unix command interpreter written at Berkeley 1978
• Berkeley Software Distribution TCP/IP stack invention
  His own networking implementation, folded into BSD Unix 1983
• Sun Microsystems company
  Cofounded with Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla and Andy Bechtolsheim 1982
• "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" article
  Wired essay warning against genetic, nano and robotic technology 2000

• 1975 aged ~21 Enters the graduate program at UC Berkeley Joined Bob Fabry's Computer Systems Research Group.
• 1978 aged ~24 Distributes an early Berkeley Software Distribution release
• 1979 aged ~25 Completes his master's degree at Berkeley
• 1982 aged ~28 Cofounds Sun Microsystems
• 1986 aged ~32 Wins the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award
• 1999 aged ~45 Elected to the National Academy of Engineering
• 2000 aged ~46 Publishes "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" in Wired
• September 9, 2003 aged 48 Leaves Sun Microsystems
• January 2005 aged 50 Becomes a partner at Kleiner Perkins

• Ken Thompson b. 1943
  Co-created Unix at Bell Labs and later co-designed the Go programming language. extended the Unix built by
• Vint Cerf b. 1943
  Co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols that form the foundation of the internet. implemented the protocol designed by
• Al Gore b. 1948
  Vice president and 2000 presidential candidate who became a leading advocate for climate policy. venture partner alongside at Kleiner Perkins