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 (16)	ミシガン大学に入学
1974 (19)	カリフォルニア大学バークレー校 がUNIXを導入
1975 (20)	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、コードを書きまくる
1978.3 (23)	1BSD (first Berkeley Software Distribution) をリリース
1979.5 (24)	2BSD (Second Berkeley Software Distribution) をリリース
1979	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 (27)	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 (30)	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 といった最先端プロセッサーの設計開発に参加
1986 (31)	BSD開発に対して ACMグレース・ホッパー賞 受賞
1988 (33)	サンで会長よりも上のポジションとして公表
1991 (36)	リーナス(22才) によって Linux が公開
1995 (40)	サンの名の下に Java を公開
1997 (42)	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 (44)	ベンチャーキャピタル HighBAR Ventures 創業
2000.4 (45)	Wiredに寄稿『Why The Future Doesn't Need Us』
2003.9 (48)	サン・マイクロシステムズ退社
2004 (49)	Java言語仕様第３版 監修
2005.1 (50)	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.
• 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.
• I have spent the last 20 years still trying to figure out how to make computers as reliable as I want them to be (they are not nearly there yet) and how to make them simple to use (a goal that has met with even less relative success).
• In my own work, as codesigner of three microprocessor architectures—SPARC, picoJava, and MAJC—and as the designer of several implementations thereof, I've been afforded a deep and firsthand acquaintance with Moore's law.
• In designing software and microprocessors, I have never had the feeling that I was designing an intelligent machine. The software and hardware is so fragile and the capabilities of the machine to "think" so clearly absent.
• But now, with the prospect of human-level computing power in about 30 years, a new idea suggests itself: that I may be working to create tools which will enable the construction of the technology that may replace our species. How do I feel about this? Very uncomfortable.
• Having struggled my entire career to build reliable software systems, it seems to me more than likely that this future will not work out as well as some people may imagine. My personal experience suggests we tend to overestimate our design abilities.
• How soon could such an intelligent robot be built? The coming advances in computing power seem to make it possible by 2030.
• If nanotechnology was our future, then I didn't feel pressed to solve so many problems in the present. I would get to Drexler's utopian future in due time; I might as well enjoy life more in the here and now. It didn't make sense, given his vision, to stay up all night, all the time.
• I moved to Colorado, to a skunk works I had set up, and the focus of my work shifted to software for the Internet, specifically on ideas that became Java and Jini.
• we obviously have so much trouble making relatively simple things work, and so much trouble managing—or even understanding—ourselves.
• The clear fragility and inefficiencies of the human-made systems we have built should give us all pause; the fragility of the systems I have worked on certainly humbles me.
• His stated reason seems a bit strange: not because of the fear of large casualties from an invasion of Japan, but because the United Nations, which was soon to be formed, should have foreknowledge of atomic weapons.
• Jacques Attali, whose book Lignes d'horizons ( Millennium, in the English translation) helped inspire the Java and Jini approach to the coming age of pervasive computing, as previously described in this magazine
• I don't know where these people hide their fear. As an architect of complex systems I enter this arena as a generalist. But should this diminish my concerns?
• My continuing professional work is on improving the reliability of software. Software is a tool, and as a toolbuilder I must struggle with the uses to which the tools I make are put. I have always believed that making software more reliable, given its many uses, will make the world a safer and better place.
• So I'm still searching; there are many more things to learn. Whether we are to succeed or fail, to survive or fall victim to these technologies, is not yet decided. I'm up late again—it's almost 6 am. I'm trying to imagine some better answers, to break the spell and free them from the stone.

インタビュー映像

• Copy of Computer Chronicles - UNIX (1985)
• The Open System Imperative (1987)
• Bill Joy Co-Founder of Sun Microsystems (2005)
• 未来について、ビル・ジョイが思いを巡らせる (2006)