William Nelson Joy grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, the oldest of three children of two schoolteachers. In his Computer History Museum oral history, recorded in Mountain View in 2011, he recalls studying at the University of Michigan and then at Berkeley “before starting Sun Microsystems in 1982.” The museum’s catalog record credits him with the “Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) version of UNIX, ex and vi editors and the C shell and a high-performance TCP/IP stack.”
Joy arrived at Berkeley as a graduate student in the fall of 1975. Marshall Kirk McKusick’s firsthand history “Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix” describes how Joy, frustrated with the line-oriented editors available on the new screen terminals, built the visual editor that became vi, along with the termcap terminal database. He soon took charge of the day-to-day work of building and shipping the Berkeley distributions of Unix.
In early 1980 Joy phoned Professor Bob Fabry to express interest in leading the further development of Unix at Berkeley, and he became a central figure in the Computer Systems Research Group that grew up around the DARPA-funded work. Much of the networking and system software that made BSD influential passed through his hands during these years.
In 1982 Joy left Berkeley to co-found Sun Microsystems with Andy Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, and Scott McNealy, becoming the company’s software architect. There he carried the Berkeley Unix tradition into a generation of networked workstations and, later, into the Java era of portable software.