Editing Bill Joy (section)

==Early career==
Joy was born in the Detroit suburb of [[Farmington Hills, Michigan]], to William Joy, a school vice-principal and counselor, and Ruth Joy. He earned a [[Bachelor of Science]] in [[electrical engineering]] from the [[University of Michigan]] and a [[Master of Science]] in [[electrical engineering]] and [[computer science]] from the [[University of California, Berkeley]], in 1979.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://berkeley.edu/tour/students/famous_alumni2.html|title=UC Berkeley Online Tour: Famous Alumni|publisher=University of California, Berkeley|access-date=July 1, 2010|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100527100153/http://www.berkeley.edu/tour/students/famous_alumni2.html|archive-date=May 27, 2010|url-status=dead}}</ref>

While a graduate student at Berkeley, he worked for Fabry's [[Computer Systems Research Group]] (CSRG) on the [[Berkeley Software Distribution]] (BSD) version of the [[Unix]] operating system. He initially worked on a [[Pascal (programming language)|Pascal]] compiler left at Berkeley by [[Ken Thompson]], who had been visiting the university when Joy had just started his graduate work.<ref name="opensources"/>

He later moved on to improving the Unix [[Kernel (operating system)|kernel]], and also handled BSD distributions.<ref name="opensources">{{cite encyclopedia |title=Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix: From AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable|first=Marshall Kirk|last=McKusick|author-link=Marshall Kirk McKusick|encyclopedia=Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution|year=1999|publisher=O'Reilly}}</ref> Some of his most notable contributions were the [[Ex (text editor)|ex]] and [[Vi (text editor)|vi]] editors and the [[C shell]]. Joy's prowess as a computer programmer is legendary, with an oft-told anecdote that he wrote the vi editor in a weekend. Joy denies this assertion.<ref>Ashlee Vance,[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/09/11/bill_joys_greatest_gift "Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor"] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140603174753/https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/09/11/bill_joys_greatest_gift|date=2014-06-03}}, ''The Register'', September 11, 2003.</ref> A few of his other accomplishments have also been sometimes exaggerated; [[Eric Schmidt]], CEO of [[Novell]] at the time, inaccurately reported during an interview in [[PBS]]'s documentary ''[[Nerds 2.0.1]]'' that Joy had personally rewritten the BSD kernel in a weekend.<ref>{{cite web| url = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08PmIv1l5LY| title = Eric Schmidt: At Berkeley, Bill Joy written and rewritten the kernel over a weekend. No human on the planet could do this except for Bill| website = [[YouTube]]}}</ref> 
In 1980, he also wrote <code>cat -v</code>,<ref>displays nonprinting characters, except for tabs and the end of line character</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=https://fossil.fuhrwerks.com/csrg/fdiff?v1=d6eb5fa5a41b9648&v2=7fb8837733dec112 |title=Computer Systems Research Group BSD Distribution: Diff |last=Joy |first=Bill |date=October 10, 1980 |publisher=[[Computer Systems Research Group]] |access-date=December 15, 2022 |quote=case 'v':}}</ref> about which [[Rob Pike]] and [[Brian W. Kernighan]] wrote that it went against [[Unix philosophy]].<ref>{{cite journal |title=Program Design in the UNIX Environment |author1=Rob Pike |author2=Brian W. Kernighan |date=October 1984 |url=https://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/unix_prog_design.pdf |journal=AT&T Bell Laboratories Technical Journal |volume=63 |issue=8 |at=part 2 |access-date=December 15, 2022 |quote=cat therefore shouldn’t transform its input}}</ref>

According to a ''[[Salon (website)|Salon]]'' article, during the early 1980s, [[DARPA]] had contracted the company [[BBN Technologies|Bolt, Beranek and Newman]] (BBN) to add [[TCP/IP]] to Berkeley UNIX. Joy had been instructed to plug BBN's stack into Berkeley Unix, but he refused to do so, as he had a low opinion of BBN's TCP/IP. So, Joy wrote his own high-performance TCP/IP stack. According to [[John Gage]]:

{{blockquote|''BBN had a big contract to implement TCP/IP, but their stuff didn't work, and grad student Joy's stuff worked. So they had this big meeting and this grad student in a T-shirt shows up, and they said, "How did you do this?" And Bill said, "It's very simple&nbsp;&mdash; you read the protocol and write the code.''<ref name=salon/>|[[John Gage]]}}

Rob Gurwitz, who was working at BBN at the time, disputes this version of events.<ref name=salon>[http://www.salon.com/2000/05/16/chapter_2_part_one/ "BSD Unix: Power to the people, from the code"], Andrew Leonard, ''Salon'', May 16, 2000.</ref>