William Joy

Name: William (Bill) Nelson Joy

Born: November 8, 1954, in Farmington Hills, Michigan

Computer-related contributions

• American computer scientist.
• Joy co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy and Andy Bechtolsheim and served as chief scientist at the company until 2003.
• He played an important role in the early development of BSD while a grad student at Berkeley.
• Joy is the original author of the vi text editor.

Significant publications

• Why the Future Doesn't Need Us, WIRED magazine (2000).

Honors and awards

• Inducted as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum (2011).
• Awarded a Grace Murray Hopper Award by the ACM for his work on the Berkeley UNIX Operating System (1986).

Quotes

"The experiences of the atomic scientists clearly show the need to take personal responsibility, the danger that things will move too fast, and the way in which a process can take on a life of its own. We can, as they did, create insurmountable problems in almost no time flat. We must do more thinking up-front if we are not to be similarly surprised and shocked by the consequences of our inventions."

"I think the wonderful thing about vi is that it has such a good market share because we gave it away. Everybody has it now. So it actually had a chance to become part of what is perceived as basic UNIX." - Unix Review (1984)