See full version: What did Bill Joy do
Bill Joy, the “Edison of the Internet” and cofounder of Sun Microsystems (one of the most important companies in Silicon Valley), first discovered computer programing at the University of Michigan. He went on to make several significant contributions to the world of computer science.
Practical intelligence is the type of intelligence that is different from what IQ measures. Langan had innate ability, however, he lacked the element of practical intelligence, which is essential to the totality of knowledge.Is IQ solely a measure of innate ability? here
Bill Joy, in full William Nelson Joy, (born Novem, Farmington Hills, Michigan, U.S.), American software developer, entrepreneur, and cofounder of the computer manufacturer Sun Microsystems.
In the article "The Dream of a Lifetime" from the August 2005 issue of TechnologyReview.com Bill Joy talks about the past and the future and says nice things about MTS and the Merit Network in passing: here
"Do you know what the difference is between the computing cards and time-sharing?" Joy says. "It's the difference between playing chess by mail and speed chess." Programming wasn't an exercise in frustration anymore. It was fun.
This was the opportunity that greeted Bill Joy when he arrived on the Ann Arbor campus in the fall of 1971. He hadn't chosen Michigan because of its computers. He had never done anything with computers in high school. He was interested in math and engineering. But when the programming bug hit him in his freshman year, he found himself--by the happiest of accidents--in one of the few places in the world where a seventeen-year-old could program all he wanted.
This is where Michigan came in, because Michigan was one of the first universities in the world to switch over to time-sharing. By 1967, a prototype of the system was up and running. By the early 1970s, Michigan had enough computing power that a hundred people could be programming simultaneously in the Computer Center. "In the late sixties, early seventies, I don't think there was anyplace else that was exactly like Michigan," Mike Alexander, one of the pioneers of Michigan's computing system, said. "May be MIT. Maybe Carnegie Mellon. Maybe Dartmouth. I don't think there were any others."
"I lived in the north campus, and the Computer Center was in the north campus," Joy went on. "How much time did I spend there? Oh, a phenomenal amount of time. It was open twenty-four hours. I would stay there all night, and just walk home in the morning. In an average week in those years, I was spending more time in the Computer Center than on my classes. All of us down there had this recurring nightmare of forgetting to show up for class at all, of not even realizing we were enrolled.
More recently, Joy has made a name for himself as a leading voice warning of the potential dangers of advanced science. In 2000, the same year that the federal government launched the National Nanotechnology Initiative, Joy published an article in Wired magazine that described what he saw as the potential dangers of nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and other advanced technologies. The article, “Why the Future Does Not Need Us,” brought the potential dangers of nanotechnology to a broad audience for the first time. Influenced by the writings of Theodore Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, and Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation, Joy argued that self-replicating nanobots, intelligent robots, and other potential advances in technology might one day prove too difficult for society to safely manage. Terrorists, for example, might design massively destructive biological weapons, while a self-replicating “gray goo” made from nanobots might ravage the earth. As a result of such risks, Joy argued, there are some lines of research that scientists simply should not pursue. Society must, he argued, “limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.” The article was, as one observer put it, “a Cassandra cry about the perils of 21st-century technology and a striking display of ambivalence from a premier technologist.” here
Bill Joy is a well-known computer software engineer, businessman, and futurist. He was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1954, and received a B.S.E.E. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1975. He then moved to California and received a M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Joy has been an important figure in the recent history of modern computing. While at Berkley he played a central role in the development of Berkeley Unix, the basis for many current forms of the UNIX operating system, and in 1983 he founded Sun Microsystems, one of the leading software companies in the United States. He served as CEO and chief researcher for Sun until 2003, when he resigned in order to pursue other opportunities. His other important contributions include the development of the TCP/IP protocol, the SPARC microprocessor, and the Java programming language.
Joy has proposed a variety of remedies to address his concerns. He argues, for example, that companies involved in risky areas of research be forced to take out insurance policies, and that science guilds should have the authority to limit access to potentially dangerous lines of research. The impact of his warnings is difficult to discern: on the one hand, some scientists dismiss his arguments as the claims of a neo-Luddite who is, as a software engineer, unqualified to speak on complex issues related to biotechnology. Others, however, argue that his efforts have played an important role in moving nanotechnology research away from the molecular manufacturing approach favored by Drexler and his followers and toward “top down” models that might be easier to control. As a recent article in Wired argued, discussing the impact of his original essay, “suddenly, nanotech replaced Y2K as the nightmare du jour. And this in turn inspired some scientists, hoping for funding, to push a very different approach—not the bottom-up vision of molecules manufacturing things, but a top-down system of human-controlled machines making ever smaller stuff.” According to this perspective, Joy’s arguments also helped drive federal funding away from the molecular-manufacturing approach to nanotechnology as scientists sought to avoid panicking lawmakers and the public.
Although causing considerable controversy, Joy’s views on the potential dangers of advanced technology are just one part of a long career working to advance human knowledge. Joy has received a variety of awards for his work in the software industry, including the MCI WorldCom Information Technology Leadership Award for Innovation in 1991 and the Computerworld Smithsonian Award for Innovation in 1999. In 1997 he was appointed by President Clinton to be Co-Chairman of the Presidential Information Technology Advisory Committee, and he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2003 he left Sun Microsystems and founded the capital venture company HighBar Ventures. He currently lives in Aspen, Colorado, with his wife and four children.
While at Sun, Joy helped create the Java programming language, which for the first time allowed developers to create applications viewable on any computer. Joy was also a creator of the BSD UNIX, one of the first operating systems with built in Internet connectivity. Parts of the BSD UNIX code are still used in current computing systems. here
With Scott McNealy, Bill Joy is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Sun was an important driver of the development of the Internet, producing workstations and servers that made it easier for businesses to grow on the Web.
Joy has been involved with two venture capital firms, HighBAR Ventures, founded with two colleagues from Sun; and Kleiner Caulfield & Byers, where he became a partner in 2005.