Bill Joy, networker-in-chief

“OPERATING systems”, Bill Joy once declared, “are like underwear—nobody really wants to look at them.” For more than 25 years, the mantra that computing should remain simple and that operating systems should be hidden in the background has been a guiding principle for Mr Joy, chief scientist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems. That quest for simplicity has made him one of the most influential and prolific inventors in the computer business.

Part-scientist with the necessary scruffy hair and crumpled clothes, and part-businessman with a keen sense of marketing and strategy, Mr Joy has had a hand in developing almost every crucial technology for the Internet of the past two-and-a-half decades. He is also credited with dreaming up the technologies that made Sun what it is today. In the 1970s, he turned Berkeley Unix into the leading operating system for mainframe computers and servers. In the 1980s, he helped to design the Sparc microprocessor that is the heart of Sun's successful server business. In the 1990s, he spearheaded the development of the Java programming language for portable Internet applications. Today, he is leading the push into distributed computing, popularised by “peer-to-peer” techniques.

Through it all, he has focused on moving the complexity of computing from the desktop to the network where, he has long argued, it can be managed more easily, and without the user noticing. In 1988, that vision was crystallised in Sun's enduring slogan: “The network is the computer.” In the decade and a half since setting Sun's agenda, Mr Joy's vision has turned the company into an $18 billion powerhouse, with products that are the very heartbeat of the Internet itself.

If Mr Joy were to have his way, however, the future of computing would rest on a mere 50,000 lines of computer code that make up his year-old initiative called JXTA (pronounced “Juxta”), which seeks to build standards and infrastructure for peer-to-peer computing. First announced in 2001, JXTA is the culmination of a decades-long effort to build and popularise the infrastructure for distributed computing. At stake, say proponents, is the complete rewiring of the Internet—an undertaking that promises to unleash a whole new wave of software innovation that Sun hopes to ride successfully.

Bill Joy's impact on computing began back in the mid-1970s at the University of California, Berkeley, where researchers were pioneering a new kind of computing architecture. Their aim was to make it easier for computers to communicate with one another—and, in the process, to encourage the development of what were to be called personal computers. Bill Joy, then a young man from Michigan, had opted to do his masters degree at Berkeley because the campus had the worst facilities of any that accepted him—and therefore, he felt, offered the greatest challenge. “At Berkeley,” says Eric Schmidt, an old friend who is now boss of Google, an Internet-search firm, “there were graduate students, and then there was Bill Joy.”

It was Berkeley Unix that made him a legend in the computer industry. The Unix operating system was developed at AT&T's Bell Laboratories in the early 1970s and had been distributed freely to government organisations and universities for use in their mainframes. At Berkeley, Mr Joy and his colleagues began tinkering with it to fix bugs in the code. Their improvements quickly caught the eye not only of other universities, but also of the Pentagon. In 1978, Mr Joy and his colleagues were awarded a contract by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, to develop an operating system that could connect Digital Equipment's widely-used VAX super-minicomputers into a fledgling network that DARPA called “the Internet”.

By integrating a recently-devised communications protocol called TCP/IP with his version of Unix, Mr Joy helped to lay the foundation for the popular use of the Internet. In short order, the Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) of Unix became the most widely used operating system of its day. Even now, the various incarnations of BSD remain the main rival for Microsoft's NT/2000 operating system on servers. It is also the basis of Apple's OS X operating system.

“As technology becomes ever more accessible to ever more people, they become ever more reliant upon it.”

Fast forward to 1982, when three Stanford graduates, Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy and Andreas Bechtolsheim, persuaded Mr Joy to create the software for a cheap but powerful computer they had built called the S.U.N (short for Stanford University Network) workstation. The Stanford trio hoped to take Unix from the realm of universities and research laboratories into industry. And while the group never expected Mr Joy to be a wizard chip designer as well as a software genius, two years later he and a colleague, David Patterson, developed a new microprocessor that raised number-crunching to a new level of performance. Ever since, Mr Joy's RISC (reduced instruction-set computing) processor has been the mainstay of the company's $10 billion server business. In the process, Sun Microsystems has become the world's leading supplier of networked workstations.

From the beginning, the central theme in Mr Joy's work has been to tie microprocessor-controlled systems together into a unitary whole. As early as 1978, he envisaged a world in which electronic devices would be sprinkled into everything, from thermostats and washing-machines to shoes and clothing, all communicating with one another in a sort of information ecosystem. To make this happen, he seized on the concept of “distributed computing” (ie, peer-to-peer computing) to unleash the power of every device, while allowing computational problems to be broken down into smaller, more manageable pieces.

At the time, such an idea seemed ridiculous. Desktop computers were simply not kitted out for such work. Besides, the notion of tethering independent computing devices into a single system was fraught with management problems. For instance, there was no way of telling which unit was working and which was not, or which processor was actually managing the resulting network and how it might pass control to another processor if it went on the blink.

The first clue as to how to make distributed computing work came in the 1980s, when Sun started developing a new operating system, called Oak, for interactive television—an application that proved to be ahead of its time. But by the early 1990s, when the World Wide Web took off, Mr Joy realised that Oak held the key. Building on that, Sun came up with a new programming language called Java. This permitted information to be shared as “objects”, complete with data and a way of analysing them.

Java's attraction was its ability to create small, efficient programs that could be sent easily over the Internet and, in theory, run on virtually any machine. Its simplicity, Mr Joy insists, helps to produce far more reliable and more secure programs. That makes them ideal for small, embedded computing systems such as mobile phones and portable gadgets. In 1999, Mr Joy took his vision a step further with Jini, a networking technology that uses Java to make connecting devices together much easier—allowing, say, a digital camera to communicate directly with a printer without having to use a PC as an interlocutor.


In the three years since Jini was introduced, the concept of peer-to-peer computing has itself gained ground, thanks largely to the growing power of personal computers. Today, even the simplest of computing devices has more than enough processing power to connect direct to other processors, without needing the help of a central server.

But once peer-to-peer computing became a fad, dozens of companies, each with its own proprietary system, rushed for a piece of the pie. The chaos threatened to make the whole thing unworkable. What was needed, argued Mr Joy, was an organisation to build the foundations for this new style of computing, allowing the peer-to-peer companies to do what they do best—develop applications.

Hence JXTA. With his colleague Mike Clary, Mr Joy secretly launched the project in 2000 as a way of organising software developers and establishing standards for peer-to-peer computing. All told, JXTA is based on six protocols that let peers (ie, individual computers) find one another and organise themselves into groups. Ultimately, it appears rather like an operating system for running a peer-to-peer network. Mr Joy likens it to the TCP/IP stack of software that he added to Unix in 1982 so that computers could connect to the Internet. And, as happened with BSD Unix, Mr Joy is determined to make his open-source JXTA the standard for peer-to-peer networking.

What does Sun get out of this charitable undertaking? Mr Joy insists that Sun does not intend to make money out of JXTA. What it would like to do instead is create a market that would generate a demand for its products and services. Yet, if peer-to-peer is intended to bypass servers, surely JXTA can only nibble away at Sun's core business of selling such machines? Mr Joy believes not. He insists that it will boost demand for servers in high-value applications such as transaction processing and databases, where centralisation is indispensable.

The corollary to Mr Joy's quest for simplicity is that, as technology becomes ever more accessible to ever more people, those people become ever more reliant on it. This has begun to trouble him. He fears that the speed of technological development may exceed humanity's moral and mental capacity to control it. He first fretted about this in an article for Wired entitled “Why the future doesn't need us”. In particular, he wrote of the dangers of the “GNR (genetic nanotechnology robotics) revolution”, saying that this putative technology could smother the human race into extinction.“This is a story that discovered me,” Mr Joy admits. “I just happened to discover that what I saw as a problem no-one else seemed to be talking about.”

Mr Joy was just blocks away from the World Trade Centre on September 11th 2001. For him, the events of that day were a clear warning of the risks people face in the modern world. Being singular in nature, such events are almost impossible to prevent scientifically. And yet, technology proved to be the enabling force for those who wished to harm others. “Bill's job is to challenge the conventional wisdom,” says Mr Schmidt. “He has been thinking about these things for years, but it took until now for all of them to come together.” Bill Joy's message is simple and succinct: “We must keep our euphoria with technology in check.”