William Nelson Joy commonly known as Bill Joy, is an American computer scientist

Computer scientist

A computer scientist is a scientist who has acquired knowledge of computer science, the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their application in computer systems....

. Joy co-founded Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...

 in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla

Vinod Khosla

Vinod Khosla is an Indian-born American venture capitalist and an influential personality in Silicon Valley....

, Scott McNealy

Scott McNealy

Scott McNealy is an American business executive. He co-founded computer technology company Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy, and Andy Bechtolsheim.-Biography:...

 and Andy Bechtolsheim

Andy Bechtolsheim

Andreas von Bechtolsheim is an electrical engineer who co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 and was its chief hardware designer....

, and served as chief scientist at the company until 2003. He is widely known for having written the essay "Why the future doesn't need us

Why the future doesn't need us

"Why the future doesn't need us" is an article written by Bill Joy in the April 2000 issue of Wired magazine...

", where he expresses deep concerns over the development of modern technologies. He played an integral role in the early development of BSD UNIX while a graduate student at Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

, and he is the original author of the vi

Vi

vi is a screen-oriented text editor originally created for the Unix operating system. The portable subset of the behavior of vi and programs based on it, and the ex editor language supported within these programs, is described by the Single Unix Specification and POSIX.The original code for vi...

 text editor.
Joy was born in the Detroit suburb Farmington Hills, Michigan

Farmington Hills, Michigan

Farmington Hills is a community in southeastern Michigan. It is the largest city in Oakland County in the U.S. state of Michigan. Its population was 79,740 at the 2010 census...

 to William Joy, a school vice-principal and counselor, and Ruth Joy.