People

Bill Joy

Bill Joy
Photo: The original uploader was SqueakBox at English Wikipedia., CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

b. 1954, Farmington Hills, Michigan · BSD Unix; author of vi and csh; co-founder of Sun Microsystems

Also known as: Joy, William Nelson Joy

Bill Joy was the principal architect of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) at UC Berkeley, contributing virtual memory, TCP/IP networking, the Berkeley Fast File System, and job control to the Unix lineage Linux inherited from.

He wrote vi in 1976 and the C shell (csh). Every modern vim and the BSD-derived tools used across Linux descend from his work.

Related people: Ken Thompson, Bram Moolenaar

Works cited in this book:

Discussed in:

Textbook of Linux — Learn Linux on iPhone — Download on the App Store