Textbook of Linux

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 a graduate student at UC Berkeley when he became the principal architect of the Berkeley Software Distribution — the Unix variant that added virtual memory, TCP/IP networking, the Berkeley Fast File System, job control, and much else. He wrote vi in 1976 (over a summer, with a 300 bps modem) and the C shell (csh), which introduced job control and command history to interactive Unix.

In 1982 Joy co-founded Sun Microsystems, where he remained chief scientist for two decades. He led the design of much of Sun's early operating-system work — including NFS — and contributed to the Java specification and the SPARC architecture.

Joy's 2000 essay Why the Future Doesn't Need Us — a cautionary piece about genetics, nanotechnology, and AI — made him an unexpected public intellectual. He now works on venture-backed environmental and energy projects. His code, though, is what runs every day: every modern vim, nvi, and BSD descendant carries his design decisions from the 1970s.