Bill Joy

Joy at World Economic Forum (Davos), 2003-01

American computer engineer and venture capitalist.

- Bill Joy

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Vi

Screen-oriented text editor originally created for the Unix operating system.

vi editing a Hello World program in C. Tildes signify lines not present in the file.

Bill Joy, the original creator of the vi editor

The vi editor in OpenBSD (nvi) on startup, editing a temporary empty file

The vi editor in OpenBSD, editing a small "Hello, world!" type Ruby program

The vi editor employed minimal logic that would aid the user. This included trivial aids such as how to join two lines together and maintain reasonable usage of whitespace.

The vi editor has a number of revisions; however, the primary purpose was to allow a user to enjoy the full "visual" screen mode of modern terminals.

The original code for vi was written by Bill Joy in 1976, as the visual mode for a line editor called ex that Joy had written with Chuck Haley.

Scott McNealy

American businessman.

He is most famous for co-founding the computer technology company Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy, and Andy Bechtolsheim.

Berkeley Software Distribution

Discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley.

Simplified evolution of Unix systems. Not shown are Junos, PlayStation 3 system software and other proprietary forks.

The VAX-11/780, a typical minicomputer used for early BSD timesharing systems

"4.3 BSD UNIX" from the University of Wisconsin circa 1987. System startup and login.

4.3 BSD from the University of Wisconsin. Displaying the man page for Franz Lisp

Tape for SunOS 4.1.1, a 4.3BSD derivative

Sony NEWS workstation running the BSD-based NEWS-OS operating system

Graduate students Chuck Haley and Bill Joy improved Thompson's Pascal and implemented an improved text editor, ex.

American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the Network File System (NFS), VirtualBox, and SPARC microprocessors.

Aerial photograph of the Sun headquarters campus in Santa Clara, California

Buildings 21 and 22 at Sun's headquarters campus in Santa Clara

Sun server racks at Seneca College (York Campus)

Sun Microsystems at the Computer Museum of America in Roswell, Georgia

A fountain within the Sun main campus in Santa Clara

Bill Joy of Berkeley, a primary developer of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), joined soon after and is counted as one of the original founders.

Vinod Khosla

Indian-American billionaire businessman and venture capitalist.

In 1982, Khosla co-founded Sun Microsystems (SUN is the acronym for the Stanford University Network), along with Stanford classmates Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtolsheim, and UC Berkeley computer science graduate student Bill Joy.

C shell

tcsh and sh side-by-side on a Mac OS X desktop

64-bit Hamilton C shell on a Windows 7 desktop.

The C shell (csh or the improved version, tcsh) is a Unix shell created by Bill Joy while he was a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley in the late 1970s.

Kleiner Perkins

American venture capital firm which specializes in investing in incubation, early stage and growth companies.

Beyond the original founders, notable members of the firm have included individuals such as John Doerr, Vinod Khosla, and Bill Joy.

Network File System

Distributed file system protocol originally developed by Sun Microsystems (Sun) in 1984, allowing a user on a client computer to access files over a computer network much like local storage is accessed.

NFS SPECsfs2008 performance comparison, as of 22 November 2013

People involved in the creation of NFS version 2 include Russel Sandberg, Bob Lyon, Bill Joy, Steve Kleiman, and others.

Ken Thompson

American pioneer of computer science.

DEC PDP-7, as used for initial work on Unix

Thompson (sitting) and Ritchie working together at a PDP-11

Version 6 Unix running on the SIMH PDP-11 simulator, with "/usr/ken" still present

Plan 9 from Bell Labs, running the acme text editor, and the rc shell

In early 1976, Thompson wrote the initial version of Berkeley Pascal at the Computer Science Division, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, UC Berkeley (with extensive modifications and additions following later that year by William Joy, Charles Haley and faculty advisor Susan Graham).

Technological singularity

Hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization.

Ray Kurzweil writes that, due to paradigm shifts, a trend of exponential growth extends Moore's law from integrated circuits to earlier transistors, vacuum tubes, relays, and electromechanical computers. He predicts that the exponential growth will continue, and that in a few decades the computing power of all computers will exceed that of ("unenhanced") human brains, with superhuman artificial intelligence appearing around the same time.

An updated version of Moore's law over 120 Years (based on Kurzweil's graph). The 7 most recent data points are all NVIDIA GPUs.

Schematic Timeline of Information and Replicators in the Biosphere: Gillings et al.'s "major evolutionary transitions" in information processing.

Amount of digital information worldwide (5 bytes) versus human genome information worldwide (1019 bytes) in 2014.

In this sample recursive self-improvement scenario, humans modifying an AI's architecture would be able to double its performance every three years through, for example, 30 generations before exhausting all feasible improvements (left). If instead the AI is smart enough to modify its own architecture as well as human researchers can, its time required to complete a redesign halves with each generation, and it progresses all 30 feasible generations in six years (right).

These threats are major issues for both singularity advocates and critics, and were the subject of Bill Joy's April 2000 Wired magazine article "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us".