Portal:Java/Selected biography/3
| William Nelson Joy | |
|---|---|
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| Born | November 8, 1954 |
| Residence |  United States |
| Alma mater | University of Michigan, University of California, Berkeley |
| Occupation | Computer Scientist |
| Known for | Co-founder of Sun Microsystems vi NFS csh "Why the future doesn't need us" |
William Nelson Joy (born November 8, 1954), commonly known as Bill Joy, is an American computer scientist. Joy co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtolsheim and Vaughan Pratt, and served as chief scientist at the company until 2003. He is widely known for having written the essay "Why the future doesn't need us", where he expresses deep concerns over the development of modern technologies. He has two children, Hayden and Maddie.
Sun
According to a Salon.com article, during the early 1980s DARPA had contracted the company Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) to add TCP/IP to Berkeley UNIX. Joy had been instructed to plug BBN's stack into Berkeley Unix, but he refused to do so, as he had a low opinion of BBN's TCP/IP. So, Joy wrote his own high-performance TCP/IP stack. According to John Gage,
"BBN had a big contract to implement TCP/IP, but their stuff didn't work, and Joy's grad student stuff worked. So they had this big meeting and this grad student in a T-shirt shows up, and they said, 'How did you do this?' And Bill said, 'It's very simple — you read the protocol and write the code.'"
Rob Gurwitz, who was working at BBN at the time, disputes this version of events.
In 1986, Joy was awarded a Grace Murray Hopper Award by the ACM for his work on the Berkeley UNIX Operating System.
Joy was also a primary figure in the development of the SPARC microprocessors, the Java programming language, Jini / JavaSpaces and JXTA.
On September 9, 2003 Sun announced that Bill Joy was leaving the company and that he "is taking time to consider his next move and has no definite plans".
