Bill Joy
Bill Joy
William Nelson "Bill" Joyis an American computer scientist. Joy co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy and Andreas von Bechtolsheim, and served as chief scientist at the company until 2003. He played an integral role in the early development of BSD UNIX while a graduate student at Berkeley, and he is the original author of the vi text editor. He also wrote the 2000 essay "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us", in which he expressed deep...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth8 November 1954
CountryUnited States of America
The reason I use ed is that I don't want to lose what's on the screen.
What's your personal computer, anyway? Your personal computer should be something that's always on your person.
So Chuck and I looked at that and we hacked on em for a while, and eventually we ripped the stuff out of em and put some of it into what was then called en, which was really ed with some em features.
As far as I know we also almost bought Apple once. We almost merged with Apple two other times.
Not all smart people work at Sun Microsystems.
The point is that you want to have a system that is responsive.
I think Unix is a great system -- especially for running data centers -- because it is very mature, very reliable, very scalable. But when I want to go out and populate small devices, I think Java.
Just about every computer on the market today runs Unix, except the Mac and nobody cares about it.
Well, limbo is not a good place to be.
Interleaf is very nice. I expect there to be a lot of competition for programs like that.
I started to write a new editor not too long ago and had it about half done after two days.
And once an intelligent robot exists, it is only a small step to a robot species - to an intelligent robot that can make evolved copies of itself.
I think editors have to come out of a certain kind of community.
I think multiple levels of undo would be wonderful, too.