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Co-founder Joy to leave Sun
TheLinuxWarrior writes "An article
at CNET says Bill Joy, Sun Micro co-founder and chief scientist, is leaving the company." You'd think after two decades of working at Sun, they could've found a better picture!
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that's how much stock he sold when Sun was at the top. At that point he had no shares or any real stake in the company. He then bought around $3 million worth when SUNW was between $2 and $3.
And he was responsible for vi. For this I cannot decide whether he should be praised as a computer great or be disgraced as the author of the greatest horrible-excuse-for-an-editor known to man.
http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~kirkenda/joy84.html
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
The article says sun was co-founded by Scott mcneally an Bill Joy. Actually there were 4 of them out of which 2 have already quit. So with the third guy on the way out it leaves only Scott behind.
Bill Joy can easily take a lot of credit for Java though
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
Considering the chauvinisistic tone of the post, it was correctly moderated as off-topic.
Lots of Indians have done great things in IT, and so have lots of americans, russians, french, chinese, irish so on so forth. So what was the point the grand-parent trying to make ?
I am an indian too, but this kind of stupid superiority complex, that we indians rule the IT is very reprehensible.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
I priced a Sun PCI SCSI card last week. $500. No RAID, no cache, just a vanila SCSI card with a Sun sticker (and solaris support). Thats just insane.
One thing you do get is peace of mind in an environment where time == money. It is very likely that Sun-branded card was integration tested with their machines and Solaris, so the odds are very very good that it will serve you well. Contrast this with the PC world, where the odds are simply good. The difference is not trivial, IMO.
If I had a business, where revenue was good enough that I didn't have to survive on peanut butter and scrapped-together computers, I would seriously consider Sun equipment. It can be refreshing to simply plug in a card, do a boot -r, and have it ready to go. Along with SunSolve and docs.sun.com, Sun doesn't often leave people wanting for documentation, either. It seems they generally treat their customers pretty well. With PC companies, things are less predictable, and a big brand name doesn't really imply any amount of quality (often they are worse than the white-box suppliers).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
"Score: 4, Interesting" my ass.
The author claims that Joy is such a visionary that Sun's entire R&D strategy will have to change. Then in the next line he says that Joy is such a luddite that he'll never get involved with another tech company. Which is it? Visionary or luddite?
This is so plainly just somebody looking for a way to bitch about Sun that I can't believe anybody bothered to mod it up.
- Old Man of the Mountain ---- "I want to disturb my neighbor"
It is amazing how most of the American tech press is either ignorant of this or does not want to acknowledge it. Maybe it has something to with Khosla being an Indian immigrant and therefore not worthy of serious consideration. I mean, placing Khosla alongside superhuman prophetic 'native' American geniuses like Bill Joy and Scott McNeally? C'mon, the audacity! It is almost subconscious, the way immigrant contributions to Silicon Valley are automatically forgotten. And weeded out of its historical accounts so thoroughly that anyone like your truly who complains about this is considered insane and will probably be modded down to Flamebait -1. Heck, I don't care. Let the truth be known.
The idea of Sun was hatched in 1982 in Khosla's mind when he was a Stanford Business School grad student. The idea was to team up with Andy Bechtolscheim who at the time was licensing his workstation design idea to companies in Silicon Valley.
Khosla wanted Bechtolsheim to join in a partnership with him to build the workstations for sale. Khosla already had experience starting a company called Daisy Systems which went on to become one of the most successful IPOs of 1984. Anyways, he recruited Scott McNeally to help in the business side of things. Now they had two business people and a hardware expert. All they needed was a software expert to cover all facets of the product. And thats when they roped in Bill Joy, who was just 27 like the other 3, but unlike them was already nationally famous in the CS community.
Now after reading this story, tell me if the idea of Sun was not born in Khosla's mind instead of Bechtolscheim's or McNeally's or Joy's.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you can blame them for not trying. Anyway, how do you make money by creating yet another programming language? The OAK language was initially designed as a home appliance platform. It was mainly written by a few (less than ten) programmers in about one and a half year. However, they didn't quite succeeded in selling their product. The appliance manufacturers weren't all that excited about putting Motorola processors and megs of RAM in toasters and VCR's, while the interactive TV companies chose a different solution.
After a few failures a new radical decision was taken. The OAK language was redesigned (Bill Joy was the man behind the transformation) to run on desktop computers, with the Web development in mind, and so Java was born - in just a few months! The source code was set free in order to gain market share (not so in later Java versions, I beleive) - and hey, for a failed project, it's quite impressive (even if it isn't such a great source of income).
key word is "was' a visionary
and is now a luddite now.See
Wired April 2000.Why the future doesn't
need us by Bill Joy
Amigian and proud of it!