William Nelson Joy (born November 8, 1954) is an American computer engineer and venture capitalist. He 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. He 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. He also wrote the 2000 essay "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us", in which he expressed deep concerns over the development of modern technologies. Joy was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering (1999) for contributions to operating systems and networking software.
In 1982, Joy was brought into Sun Microsystems to build software for a cheap but powerful system, called the SUN workstation, to take UNIX beyond academia and make it available to industry. Six months later, Joy was made a co-founder of the company. During his time at Sun, Joy was a key contributor to the SPARC microprocessor, which was the backbone of the company’s billion-dollar server business for decades. He also inspired the development of the Java programming language and Solaris operating system. Joy left Sun Microsystems in 2003 and, two years later, joined the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, where he helped make decisions about green technology investments. He left that firm in 2014, and is now the principal investigator and chief scientist at Water Street Capital. Over the last three decades, Joy’s work on BSD and at Sun Microsystems have earned him several honors. He was inducted as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum in 2011 and received ACM’s Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1986. He is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a lifetime trustee of the Aspen Institute.
Bill Joy eJoying his drinks
This is the link to the CS Department Website: cs.gmu.edu
Source use:
+ Wikimedia Foundation. (2023, September 10). Bill Joy. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Joy
+ McConnell, S. (2023, July 27). Bill Joy: Co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Berkeley Engineering. https://engineering.berkeley.edu/bill-joy-co-founder-of-sun-microsystems/