MIT World Speakers

Bill Joy

Bill Joy led Sun's technical strategy from the founding of the company in 1982 until September 2003. While at Sun, he was a key designer of Sun technologies including Solaris, SPARC, chip architectures and pipelines, and Java. In 1995 he installed the first city-wide WiFi network. Joy has more than 40 patents issued or in progress.

Before co-founding Sun, Joy designed and wrote Berkeley UNIX - the first open source operating system with built-in TCP/IP, making it the backbone of the Internet. Fortune magazine dubbed him the "Edison of the Internet."

Joy has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Engineering, honoris causa, from the University of Michigan. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a trustee of the Aspen Institute.