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September 11, 2003
No More Joy
Looks like Sun is going to be in some trouble in the future. Apparently Bill Joy has left the company. Bill has been around since the company was founded and there are many classic stories about his contributions. According to "Life With Unix", Bill is credited with (page 32):
Bill ("wnj") Joy: Wrote much of original Berkeley release including virtual memory support, networking, Pascal, vi, csh and termcap. Co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Designed NFS. Received 1986 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for work on Berkeley UNIX.
As part of Sun he was always ready to speak up for the company. In a 1988 interview (page 45), he was asked about why SunOS was so much larger than System V9. Quick as a flash, Billy responded that it was becasuse Sun had more customers than V9 :-)
Another story is about vi (the one true editor as opposed to EMACS which would make a great operating system if only it had a decent text editor in it) development. The intent was to including windowing (ala vim) but the tape drive broke. Bill kept working without backups until his disk failed. Then he rolled back to the last backup launched the code and went onto the next project (page 189). Much later, Bill is reputed to have said that if he had known how popular vi would become then he would not have written it (page 265)!
Good luck with whatever you do Bill and thanks for all the fish code.
Posted by Ozguru at September 11, 2003 07:09 AM
Comments
Posted by: Paul Jané at September 11, 2003 07:09 AM
