Bill Joy

Cofounder of Sun Microsystems

• Born: November 8, 1954
• Place of Birth: Farmington Hills, Michigan

Primary Company/Organization: Sun Microsystems

Introduction

Second only to Bill Gates in influence was William Joy at his peak. Gates made money; Joy made technology. The day after he announced his retirement, Joy indicated that he believed he had been working the same problems for more than two decades and needed something new. In the 1970s, he moved Internet technology into the Unix operating system. His brainchild, which came later, was Java, and he pushed Sun Microsystems into developing the technology that made e-business common. However, he was not satisfied to sit on that accomplishment but instead pushed for tiny embedded computers that allowed devices to speak directly to each other, eliminating human intervention.

Early Life

William “Bill” Joy was born to William and Ruth Joy in Farmington Hills, Michigan, in 1954. His father was a schoolteacher who eventually became a stockbroker and business professor.

The eldest of three, Bill Joy was a reader at age three, in kindergarten at four, working advanced mathematics at five, and inevitably began skipping grades, being younger than his classmates and raising worries about his social development. At thirteen, he memorized the periodic table of the elements in a single night. He graduated from high school at fifteen and (to use his own term) was a “no-date nerd.”

He moved to the University of Michigan, where he became interested in computing, working after class for a professor studying parallel supercomputing, arraying microprocessors in a tight network. Joy was courted to do graduate work at Stanford University, the California Institute of Technology, and the University of California at Berkeley. He chose Berkeley in 1975 because it had the worst computer facilities of the three and Joy wanted the challenge that would pose to his ingenuity.

Shortly after he arrived at Berkeley, Joy and some computer science colleagues began debugging the Unix operating system of the department's Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) computer. They put the fixes onto a tape and sold the tapes to other universities with comparable machines for $50 per copy, enough to recoup their costs. This was the time before the personal computer, when computer geeks begged for time on university and business minicomputers and mainframes. When the university bought a DEC model called a VAX, Joy and his friends wrote their own Unix version, selling it for $300. The VAX was a hot seller at $200,000 or more; cost-conscious laboratories and universities bought theirs without software or disk drives and added third-party versions. Joy wrote and circulated a memo, “How to Buy a VAX,” that explained just how much less expensive that approach was. The Berkeley Unix became a hot item, with hundreds of orders.

In the late 1970s, as a graduate student, Joy made Unix an operating system that was strong enough to compete with the most dominant systems of the day. He also incorporated network capacities that would eventually make the Internet viable. He designed the circuits on the chips that later made Sun's SPARC (for “scalable processor architecture”) microprocessors smart enough to drive Sun's $10 billion-per-year business in workstations and servers.

Life's Work

As early as the 1970s, Joy was confident that computing could be much simpler than it was. He was obsessed with maximizing simplicity—or at least hiding the complexity within the network and letting the user see only the ease of getting and using data. In 1978, Joy and his team beat some DEC programmers for a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) contract to write the software to connect VAX machines to something called an internet. Joy took the opportunity to learn about networking protocols and added them to Unix.

In 1982, Joy was visited by Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, and Andreas Bechtolsheim. Bechtolsheim had created a desktop computer, a Stanford University Network (SUN), and Khosla wanted to market it. He needed a Unix expert, and the consensus in the industry was that Joy fit the bill. After six years, Joy was stalled on his Ph.D. and ready to move on.

The SUN desktop was what Joy had wanted for years: a networkable station. Joy joined the group, which became Sun Microsystems, and the business took off because the computers, if somewhat slow, were reliable and inexpensive. It took only six years for Sun to exceed $1 billion a year, largely due to Joy's Unix version, later renamed Solaris. When Sun went public in 1986, Joy was suddenly worth more than $10 million. Unlike McNealy, whose stock holdings mushroomed to the billion-dollar mark, Joy was relatively poor because he sold his shares within a couple of years, not wanting to risk the vagaries of the market.

Rather than stay in Silicon Valley, Joy worked with his four-person team in Aspen, Colorado, close to ski slopes. At Sun Joy pushed for a major technological shift, foreseeing an era in which businesses did not need to own all the complex hardware required for different computer applications. Instead, companies could link from basic desktop computers to whatever functionality was needed through networks.

In 1988, John Gage defined Joy's idea in a slogan: “The network is the computer.” Networked companies did not need farms full of mainframes and servers but instead subscribed to utilities via the net. Their hardware needs were for PCs or pocket-sized computers. Joy also anticipated the personal network, wherein the individual would have network access regardless of where he or she was and for whatever purpose: work, play, shopping, household management, and connection to friends and family. Joy even envisioned the impact of wireless technologies. He foresaw the evolution of wireless devices being transparent to the user, like telephones and televisions, whereby the user did not have to be a technician.

In 1994 the Java programming language was languishing in Sun's labs before Joy made it a standard for a million or more users, made the Internet exciting, and slowed Microsoft's plan to dominate the Internet. His workspace was Aspen Smallworks, a think tank for Joy and creative associates to develop new ideas away from the noise, meetings, and McNealy, all of which disrupted Joy's thinking. At Aspen, Joy made Java (originally named Oak in the mid-1980s) viable. When the web began to grow in 1994, Joy thought back to the failed Oak effort and recognized that it was ideal for enhancing web interactivity because it could write small and efficient just-in-time programs for virtually any type of computer. Java was so hot that Sun established a subsidiary for it; Microsoft adopted it; Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Byers put up $100 million to finance start-ups willing to write applications for it; student demand forced universities to offer programming classes in it; and Joy hit the conference circuit because of it.

Joy pushed Sun to the forefront of the computer industry and made the Internet not only a means of communication but also a rapidly growing tool for business and social applications. Joy in 1999 was involved in at least half of the hot technology trends of the day; Sun chief executive officer (CEO) McNealy noted that Joy was as productive as the legendary Bell Laboratories and more cost-effective.

Sun also invented Jini, which made game systems and other home entertainment formats networkable and transparent to users. Jini came five years after Sun had established the Java subsidiary. It was supposed to link not only home entertainment but also any electronic device, including cameras, phones, and the then popular personal data assistants (PDAs), appliances with embedded Java chips. With Jini, every networked device told the network what it could do and helped the other devices to use its capabilities. Jini was the technology that most simplified the network for ordinary users.

In 2000, Joy wrote an article in Wired magazine, “Why the Future Doesn't Need Us,” in which he discussed his concern that biotech and nanotechnology were progressing too rapidly and had the potential to run amok. He nevertheless remained an optimist about both Sun and the technological future, believing that the Internet would become virus and spam resistant.

Joy retired from Sun Microsystems in 2003, indicating that he was no longer interested in information technology but was moving into bioengineering and nanotechnology. In 1999, he two colleagues, Andreas Bechtolsheim and Roy Thiele-Sardiña, had founded the venture capital firm HighBAR Ventures, and in 2005 Joy became a partner in venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Byers, investing in green technologies. He was inducted as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum in 2011.

Joy left Kleiner Perkins in 2014. In July 2017, he joined Water Street Capital, a hedge fund based in Jacksonville, Florida, as its principal investigator and chief scientist.

Personal Life

Joy is noted for his broad interests, the range of his reading, and his ability to retain and link diverse subject matter, from Meso-American art to cattle ranching, Jungian theory to G. I. Gurdjieff's mysticism, and environmentalism to stock market theories. Innovation requires freedom from structure; according to Joy, overly planned, overly organized companies rarely innovate.

Joy has been known to be able to take the essential nugget from a stream of chatter and move a conversation toward a new and vital idea. He has been described as eccentric, a polymath, a whiz, and a tinkerer. He at various times owned a San Francisco gallery featuring primitive art, worked as Bill Clinton's technology adviser, taught himself to speak Spanish, and was an occasional cattle rancher. A passionate reader, he would sometimes start a book in the middle to see if he could figure out what happened in earlier chapters.

In 2006, at age fifty-two, Joy built an ecofriendly 190-foot, $50 million sailboat that would use wind power not only for propulsion but also to generate electricity. The Ethereal was intended to be a self-contained community, not just a yacht, and it had to have capacity to deal with waste as well as comfort. Joy used a world-class designer, to whom he taught integrative design process.

Bibliography

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Maynard, Andrew. "In Bill Joy's 'Why the Future Doesn't Need Us' AI Is Nowhere and Everywhere." The Future of Being Human, 26 Apr. 2023, futureofbeinghuman.com/p/in-bill-joys-why-the-future-doesnt. Accessed 6 Mar. 2024.

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