The Quiet Genius Who Brings It All Together
Behind the scenes, a Net pioneer soothes the pain of computing.
By Jared Sandberg
Slouched in the last row of the press section at the Microsoft antitrust trial in
Washington, D.C., Bill Joy, the technology pooh-bah of Sun Microsystems,
watches a government attorney cross-examine a Microsoft executive. Joy,
who has masterminded Sun's aggressive technological challenge to the
software giant, is passing through D.C. for a presidential commission he
co-chairs and dropped by to see Redmond's greatest legal challenge
firsthand. Eying the government attorney rifle through folders and wing
questions at the Microsoft VP, he leans over and whispers sympathetically:
"I'd be scared if I saw him shuffling those folders." Joy can't refrain from
taking notes. Messages hit his pager and he pecks out replies on its
Lilliputian keyboard. But when the witness gives a long-winded denial of
alleged collusion, Joy isn't so compassionate: "My father said whoever tells
the longest story is always the liar. The truth isn't that complicated."
Few things irk the normally unflappable Bill Joy, but dishonesty and
complexity are among them. Perhaps the most agile mind in the high-tech
industry, Joy has tamed vexing networking braintwisters, developed
revolutionary technologies and crusaded against the swelling complexity of
the personal computer. The modest, mussy-haired insomniac is so revered in
some research precincts that he has practically become a spiritual leader—a
kind of Dalai Lama of the lab—whose mastery and intuition have vaulted
him into the high-tech pantheon alongside Bill Gates. Nearly 20 years before
almost anyone else, Joy foresaw and popularized the connected world built
around the Internet. "I consider Bill the finest computer scientist of his
generation," says Eric Schmidt, chairman of Novell, former Sun executive
and a longtime friend. "He can see the future." (And incidentally I believe Eric does too! GO! =;)
Born in Detroit in 1954, Joy had begun to read by the age of 3. "We read to
him as a baby and the next thing you know he's reading to us," says his
father, William Joy. But after the younger Joy enrolled in grammar school,
he seemed so bored that a teacher thought he had a learning disability. So
Joy's parents had him tested—only to find out that he couldn't be accurately
measured because his intelligence was "off the charts." He entered the
University of Michigan "nerdy and unsocialized," says Joy, and set out to
study math but was quickly hooked by the lure of computers. "It's kind of
seductive," he says. "You do something and you get some feedback."
After entering graduate school at Berkeley in 1975, Joy began to etch
himself into computer history. He rewrote AT & T's Unix operating system
and built in features that would allow a computer to communicate with
others. It was the first networked operating system and fast became a
standard in computer-science circles. And he gave away the program's
technical secrets in an effort to spur innovation. Joy also took the basic
language of the Internet, known as TCP/IP, and wrote a far more robust
and efficient version when people thought it couldn't be done. Together,
those two accomplishments made him a forefather of the Net.
Fueled by an insatiable curiosity, a reverence for good ideas and an endless
appetite for books, Joy continues to synthesize the grittiest details into the
Next Big Thing as well as any genius. Present him with one of his own
accomplishments and he'll deflect credit. Instead, he'll rattle off a
bibliography of its origin, sometimes handing out spare copies of the books
that inspired him. He sits down with 10 to 20 books a night and reads them
as one surfs the Web: randomly—sometimes from the middle backward. "I
don't have time to read all the books I want to," he says. What most
occupies Joy's tireless mind these days is his campaign to bring sweet
simplicity to computing. Over lunch in San Francisco, Joy laments the
complexity that consumers must confront when they buy a PC. "It's kind of
broken when it arrives," he says, patting his pockets for his misplaced mobile
phone. Instead, he wants computers to behave more like appliances: simple
things that do specific tasks, instead of the PC, which is a jack-of-all-trades
and a master of none.
To help usher in the age of ease in computing, Joy recently developed Jini, a
system that allows people to plug all sorts of gewgaws into a network
without the hassle of configuration. Jack a printer into the network and it
announces that it's a printer and can print. It's a small piece of the puzzle,
but a world away from today's headaches. In the end, he hopes people will
one day be as shocked when a computer fails as he was when his coffee
maker burned out ("I didn't know what to do!"). He wants people to develop
the same expectations for computers and an appreciation for their design
that he has for his Braun alarm clocks (he bought several for fear they'd be
discontinued) and Gillette hot shaving cream (which he had to scavenge for
when it was phased out).
With Jini set in motion, some of Joy's key people have left his small Aspen
lab. But no matter. Joy isn't exactly short on ideas, and he likes resetting
himself to start small all over again. After all, he notes, quick to quote
someone else, the journey is the reward. Or in his own terms: "The joy is in
doing it." He should know.
Newsweek, May 31, 1999 |
