Bill Joy

年表

1954.11.8	ミシガン州デトロイトで生まれる
1959 (4)	小学校に入学
1971 (17)	ミシガン大学に入学
1974 (20)	カリフォルニア大学バークレー校 がUNIXを導入
1975 (21)	電気工学の理学士号を取得。バークレーの大学院に入学 徹夜もしながらOSを開発、vi も開発してコードを書きまくる
1979 (25)	電気工学/コンピュータサイエンスの修士号を取得 Darpa ではBSDマシンのインターネット構築と改良
1982 (28)	博士課程。Unixユーティリティソフト等の開発と配布 サン・マイクロシステムズの創業メンバーに
1985 (31)	サンでは初期のワークステーションやパソコンに加え SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) といった最先端プロセッサーの開発 Java や Jini といった初期のインターネット技術の開発に参加
1986 (32)	BSD開発に対して ACMグレース・ホッパー賞 受賞
1988 (34)	サンで会長よりも上のポジションとして公表
1991 (37)	リーナス(22才) によって Linux が公開
1995 (41)	サンよって Java が公開
1997 (43)	クリントン政権にて大統領直属情報技術諮問委員会共同委員長
1999 (45)	ベンチャーキャピタル HighBAR Ventures 創業
2000.4 (46)	Wiredに寄稿『Why The Future Doesn't Need Us』
2003.9 (49)	サン・マイクロシステムズ退社
2005.1 (49)	KPCB のパートナーに就任

参考になる発言

In The Agony and the Ecstasy, Irving Stone's biographical novel of Michelangelo, Stone described vividly how Michelangelo released the statues from the stone, "breaking the marble spell," carving from the images in his mind. In my most ecstatic moments, the software in the computer emerged in the same way. Once I had imagined it in my mind I felt that it was already there in the machine, waiting to be released. Staying up all night seemed a small price to pay to free it—to give the ideas concrete form.
- Bill Joy

• Despite my current job title of Chief Scientist at Sun Microsystems, I am more a computer architect than a scientist.
• Much of my work over the past 25 years has been on computer networking.
• My life has been driven by a deep need to ask questions and find answers. When I was 3, I was already reading, so my father took me to the elementary school, where I sat on the principal's lap and read him a story. I started school early, later skipped a grade, and escaped into books—I was incredibly motivated to learn. I asked lots of questions, often driving adults to distraction.
• the Prime Directive: to not interfere in the development of less technologically advanced civilizations. This had an incredible appeal to me; ethical humans, not robots, dominated this future, and I took Roddenberry's dream as part of my own.
• I excelled in mathematics in high school, and when I went to the University of Michigan as an undergraduate engineering student I took the advanced curriculum of the mathematics majors. Solving math problems was an exciting challenge, but when I discovered computers I found something much more interesting: a machine into which you could put a program that attempted to solve a problem, after which the machine quickly checked the solution. The computer had a clear notion of correct and incorrect, true and false. Were my ideas correct? The machine could tell me. This was very seductive.
• I was lucky enough to get a job programming early supercomputers and discovered the amazing power of large machines to numerically simulate advanced designs. When I went to graduate school at UC Berkeley in the mid-1970s, I started staying up late, often all night, inventing new worlds inside the machines. Solving problems. Writing the code that argued so strongly to be written.
• These adventures in software eventually turned into the Berkeley version of the Unix operating system.
• Instead I got a job working for Darpa putting Berkeley Unix on the Internet and fixing it to be reliable and to run large research applications well.
• At Sun, the long hours continued into the early days of workstations and personal computers, and I have enjoyed participating in the creation of advanced microprocessor technologies and Internet technologies such as Java and Jini.