William Nelson Joy was born on November 8, 1954. He is an American computer engineer and venture capitalist. In 1982, he helped start Sun Microsystems with Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, and Andy Bechtolsheim. He worked as Chief Scientist and CTO at the company until 2003.

While studying at Berkeley, Joy played an important role in developing BSD UNIX. He also created the vi text editor. In 2000, he wrote an essay titled "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us," in which he talked about worries about modern technology.

In 1999, Joy was chosen as a member of the National Academy of Engineering for his work on operating systems and networking software.

Early career

Joy was born in Farmington Hills, a city near Detroit, Michigan, to William Joy, who was an assistant principal and guidance counselor, and Ruth Joy. He received a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan and an advanced degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1979.

While studying at Berkeley, Joy worked with Bob Fabry’s research group on the BSD version of the Unix operating system. He first helped improve a Pascal compiler that had been left at the university by Ken Thompson, who was visiting when Joy began his studies.

Later, Joy worked on improving the core part of the Unix system and managed BSD distributions. He is known for creating the ex and vi editors and the C shell. Joy is widely recognized for his programming skills. A story claims he wrote the vi editor in one weekend, but Joy says this is not true. Some of his other achievements have also been exaggerated. For example, Eric Schmidt, who was the CEO of Novell at the time, incorrectly said in a documentary that Joy rewrote the BSD kernel in one weekend. In 1980, Joy also created the cat -v program. Rob Pike and Brian W. Kernighan later said this program did not follow Unix principles.

According to a Salon article, during the early 1980s, DARPA hired the company Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) to add TCP/IP to Berkeley UNIX. Joy was asked to connect BBN’s system to Berkeley Unix, but he refused because he did not trust BBN’s TCP/IP. Instead, Joy developed his own efficient TCP/IP system. John Gage later said this happened.

Rob Gurwitz, who worked at BBN during this time, disagrees with this account.

Sun Microsystems

In 1982, six months after the company started, Joy, who was Sun's sixteenth employee, joined Sun Microsystems as a full co-founder. At Sun, Joy helped create NFS, the SPARC microprocessors, the Java programming language, Jini/JavaSpaces, and JXTA.

In 1986, Joy received the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the ACM for his work on the Berkeley UNIX Operating System.

On September 9, 2003, Sun announced that Joy was leaving the company. The company stated that Joy "is taking time to consider his next move and has no definite plans."

Post-Sun activities

In 1999, Joy helped start a venture capital firm called HighBAR Ventures with two coworkers from Sun, Andy Bechtolsheim and Roy Thiele-Sardiña. In January 2005, he became a partner at another venture capital firm named Kleiner Perkins. At Kleiner Perkins, Joy has invested money in companies that work in green energy, even though he does not have formal training in that area. He once said, "My method is to look at something that seems like a good idea and believe it is true."

In 2011, Joy was honored as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum for his work on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix system and for helping to start Sun Microsystems.

Technology concerns

In 2000, Bill Joy became well-known after publishing an article in Wired magazine titled "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us." In this article, he expressed concerns that advances in genetic engineering and nanotechnology could pose risks to humanity. He argued that intelligent robots might surpass humans in intellectual and social influence in the near future. Joy supported the idea of stopping the development of GNR (genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics) technologies, rather than competing to control their harmful uses, such as using "good" nano-machines to fight "bad" nano-machines. This view was criticized by technologists like Ray Kurzweil, who instead suggested careful regulation and ethical rules. The American Spectator also criticized Joy’s essay, saying it might unintentionally support government control over technology.

A discussion with Ray Kurzweil in a bar influenced Joy’s thinking. In his essay, Joy wrote that he was surprised to learn other scientists believed similar risks were possible. He was also troubled by how few people shared his serious concerns about these dangers. These worries led him to study the issue further and examine other scientists’ views. Eventually, this led to his current work on the topic.

Despite his concerns, Joy is a venture capitalist who invests in companies working on GNR technologies. He also created a special fund to help address dangers from pandemic diseases, such as the H5N1 avian flu and biological weapons.

Joy's law

In his 2013 book Makers, author Chris Anderson gave credit to Joy for creating "Joy's law," based on a short saying: "No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else [other than you]." Anderson argued that companies often use an inefficient process by not hiring the most skilled employees, only those they can hire. His "law" built upon Friedrich Hayek's earlier work, The Use of Knowledge in Society, and warned that competition outside a company could often be stronger than the company itself.

In 1983, Joy created a formula, also called "Joy's law," that stated the peak computer speed doubles each year and is determined by a simple function of time. Specifically,

in which S represents the peak computer speed achieved during year Y, measured in MIPS.