Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium

4:15PM, Wednesday, November 17, 1999
NEC Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building B03

From BSD to Jini:
Adventures in Technology, Openness, and Community

Bill Joy
Founder and Chief Scientist
Sun Microystems
About the talk:
I created the BSD Unix distributions 20 years ago, and distributed the source for these widely. The most notable technical contribution of BSD was a high-performance and well-debugged implementation of TCP/IP on the internet, because code was available in source form. Sun started shortly thereafter, and pioneered the notion of "open system", with public interfaces but proprietary implementations, a big advance over the proprietary systems of the time.

Now, with Jini, we are both making the source code widely available, but also promoting a new way of distributiing protocols: namely by shipping "agents" (objects which implement a protocol around), by structuring distributed systems as object/agent based systems. This technical approach allows us to skip several steps: we don't need to write human-language protocol descriptions in order to distribute new functionality and protocols. This promises to greatly increase the rate of innovation in deployed services on the network.

This talk will discuss the reasons why the TCP/IP distribution was successful, the motivation for sharing the source of Berkeley UNIX in the way we did, and the simular reasons that we are optimistic about Jini. It will also discuss the thinking behind the Sun Community Source License, the Java Community Process, and the Jini Community, and how these provide new opportunities for sharing and working together effectively in the age of the net.

About the speaker:

Bill Joy, 44, Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, Inc., is a co- founder of the company and a member of the Executive Committee

Bill received a B.S.E.E. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Michigan in 1975, after which he attended graduate school at U.C. Berkeley where he was the principal designer of Berkeley UNIX (BSD) and received a M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The Berkeley version of UNIX became the standard in education and research, garnering development support from DARPA, and was notable for introducing virtual memory and internetworking using TCP/IP to UNIX. BSD was widely distributed in source form so the others could learn from it and improve it; this style of software distribution has now led to the "open source" movement, of which BSD is now recognized to be one of the earliest examples.

For his work on Berkeley UNIX, Bill received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award which is given for outstanding work in Computer Science when the recipient is under the age of thirty. In 1993, Joy was given the Lifetime Achievement Award of the USENIX Association, "For profound intellectual achievement and unparalleled services to the UNIX community."

Since joining Sun from Berkeley in 1982, he has led Sun's technical strategy, spearheading its open systems philosophy. He designed Sun's Network File System (NFS), and was a co-designer of the SPARC microprocessor Architecture. In 1991 he did the basic pipeline design of UltraSparc-I and its multimedia processing features. This basic pipeline is the one used in all of Sun's SPARC microprocessors shipping today.

More recently, Bill has led design investigations of architectures for UltraSparc V, driven the initial business and technical strategy for Java, co-designed the picoJava and ultraJava processor architectures, co-authored the specification for the Java Programming Language, and co-designed the lexial scoping and reflection APIs for Java version 1.1.

Bill's most recent work is on the Jini distributed computing technology for networking computer devices using Java, and on the Sun Community Source Licensing (SCSL) model, designed to allow companies to share their intellectual property in source form, to facilitate cooperation with customers, partners, educators and researchers. Further information on the SCSL is available at http://www.sun.com/jini.

In 1997, Joy was appointed by President Clinton as Co-Chairman of the Presidential Information technology Advisory Committee. The Advisory Committee is providing guidance and advice on all areas of high- performance computing, communications and information technologies to accelerate development and adoption of information technologies that will be vital for American prosperity in the twenty-first century. The report of the committee is available at http://www.hpcc.gov/ac. Bill was appointed as Chief Scientist of Sun in 1998. His current research is into new uses of distributed computing enabled using Java and Jini, new methods of human-computer interaction, new microprocessor and system architectures, and the uses in computing of scientific advances in areas such as complex adaptive systems, quantum computing, and the cognitive sciences.

Bill is the co-recipient, with Andy Bechtolsheim also a co-founder of Sun and now a VP at Cisco Systems, of the Computerworld Smithsonian Award for Innovation in 1999. Bill is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Bill has 13 issued patents, with 10 in progress.

Contact information:

Bill Joy
Sun Microsystems
Aspen Smallworks
315 E. Hopkins Avenue
970-920-7450
970-920-7404
bill.joy@sun.com