William N. Joy, Jr. | Biography

William N. ("Bill") Joy, Jr. earned respect as one of the first technology "gurus" associated with the early days of the computer industry in Silicon Valley. Joy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, possessed a unique understanding of the complexities of the UNIX operating system, an understanding that was rivaled only by the original developers of the system at AT&T. Indeed so acute was Joy's comprehension of the intricacies of UNIX that his own modified version of UNIX competed against and ultimately overshadowed the original AT&T version of the system.

Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1954, the first of three children, Joy was an extremely precocious child, reading stories back to his parents at age three and studying advanced mathematics at age five. Although he entered kindergarten by age four, he was emphatically bored with elementary school. So keen was his displeasure that his teachers feared that he suffered from a learning disorder. He underwent a battery of tests that revealed his intelligence was too advanced to measure accurately. He skipped his way through the elementary grades and meandered his way through high school as quickly as possible, graduating from North Farmington High School at age 15.

Joy continued his education at the University of Michigan, where he initially intended to study mathematics. In short time he succumbed to the lure of the computing machines and switched his major to computer science. After graduation in 1975, Joy elected to enroll at the University of California at Berkeley. While there, Joy updated the computer science department's UNIX operating system, a product of AT&T's Bell Systems Labs (now Lucent Technologies). He repaired device incompatibilities and other bugs that surfaced when the system was ported (converted) to run on Berkeley's Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-11 computer. In the process, Joy enhanced the operating system's network connectivity, and he and his colleagues began to sell their UNIX patch programs for $50 per copy. In 1976, when the department replaced their DEC machine with a VAX computer, Joy took charge of a second project to upgrade UNIX for the new VAX hardware and sold program licenses for $300 apiece. By 1978 Joy's version of UNIX was a respected force in the computer industry. Joy and his colleagues won a contract to adapt the VAX BSD (Berkeley) UNIX for a project called the Internet from the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) (beating a team of DEC programmers in competition for the DARPA contract). The development group, headed by Joy, adapted and essentially reinvented two networking protocols called TCP and IP to work more efficiently in the VAX UNIX environment. The Defense Department's project cemented Joy's reputation as an expert in the complexities of the UNIX operating system. In the 1990s when "Internet" became a household word, Joy was hailed as the developer who prototyped the earliest version of the network.

In 1982, Joy received a call from Vinod Khosla, a graduate of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Khosla and his colleague, Scott McNealy, along with another associate, an electrical engineer named Andreas Bechtolsheim, planned to build and market a desktop computer workstation. The computers, to be called Stanford University Network (S.U.N.) workstations, would run on UNIX and would support TCP/IP networking "out-of-the-box." Khosla, McNealy, and Bechtolsheim urged Joy to bring his UNIX expertise to their new company. Joy accepted the offer to become vice president of research and development of the new company, called Sun Microsystems Incorporated. According to Fortune, the first meeting between Joy and the rest of the group was described by McNealy as a "Vulcan mind meld," as Bechtolsheim and Joy monopolized the conversation.

The Sun Microsystems workstations earned a solid and reliable reputation as industrial strength computers with an affordable price tag. In 1986, Sun made an initial public offering of stock, and six years into the enterprise the company surpassed one billion dollars in yearly revenues. Joy's financial worth by that time was an estimated $10 million. The Sun UNIX adaptation was later renamed to Solaris, and with Joy on the Sun team, AT&T rushed to establish a cooperative alliance with the new company. So potent was the combined AT&T/Sun collaboration that industry players organized into two consortiums: the Open Software Foundation (OSF) and UNIX International. Each was geared to lessen the impact of any cooperative effort between the new UNIX giants, Sun Microsystems and AT&T.

By 1989 Joy wearied of the corporate pace. He was bored with life in Silicon Valley, and he dreaded the commute from his home in San Francisco to the Sun offices in Palo Alto. He relocated in 1991 to a mountainside research escape, high in the mountains overlooking Aspen, Colorado, and dubbed his new home Aspen Smallworks. He retained his status with Sun Microsystems and worked on assorted projects with a team of Sun developers. Most notably while in Aspen he developed the Java internet language. To create Java, Joy reincarnated a former project called Oak. Oak was geared to expedite networks of "embedded systems" (tiny, limited applications) and interactive TV, but at Oak's substance was the ability to make use of tiny portable programs to support timely and dynamic operations. The Oak system was developed too far ahead of its time, but the resurrected Java version soared to popularity in the mid-1990s. It was a near-perfect development environment for the World Wide Web. Even industry pacesetters--IBM and Microsoft--felt compelled to incorporate Java into their systems and to learn to co-habitate with the new product in order to remain competitive.

Joy's next brainchild was a network connectivity system for many devices, including wireless appliances, cell phones, compact disk players, digital cameras, printers, and televisions. Joy called the product "Jini" (pronounced like "genie"). In September of 1998 Joy made a trip to Osaka and Tokyo to sell the Jini technology to the Japanese computer industry.

Joy, who sat as the co-chair of a technology commission for President Clinton, holds a reputation as a top-notch industry leader that belies his personal nature. He is an extremely modest man who advocates simplicity and dislikes accolade, yet his opinion holds powerful sway in the technology industry. Eric Schmidt, a former coworker of Joy's, told Newsweek, "I consider Bill the finest computer scientist of his generation." Fortune called Joy's farsighted thinking "uncanny technological clairvoyance."

Joy is a member of the board of Novell Incorporated and a limited partner with Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, venture capitalists. In 1999 he was among ten honorees at the Computerworld Smithsonian Awards. He brought his family along for the occasion, including his three-year-old daughter, Madison, and his five-year-old son, Hayden, to witness the festivities when he received the Leadership Award for Innovation.