Monday, 30 August 1999
Founder, Chief Scientist,
and Corporate Executive Officer
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Thoughts on the Future of Computing and Design in the Digital Age
4:30 pm -- Doherty Hall 2315
4:15 pm - Refreshments Outside the Auditorium
We have had 50 years of computing centered on disks and the disk operating system. We are now clearly in a new age, where the focus is on the network rather than the disk. This talk will discuss these two "ages" of computing, and suggest that the next age may well be based on pervasive and distributed computing and the use of object and agent technologies. I will discuss how Java and Jini were designed to help drive this new object-centric age, and how the Java-based Pico and Majc microprocessor architectures are designed for the new related devices.
The talk continues with a discussion of design in the digital age. Moore's law of the Microcosm and Gilder's law of the Telecosm are quickly driving computing capabilities past the point of simple needs, allowing greatly improved human factors. I will propose some software layers which should greatly aid digital design, both for a screen as a virtual world and for devices which are to become part of physical places. The talk concludes by considering whether the digital landscapes we are creating will be "human" and/or "beautiful", in the context of the enormous impacts they will have on our notions of space and time.
SPEAKER BIO
Bill Joy, 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
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 that 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 done 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 lexical 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.
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.
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, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Bill has 11 issued patents, with 12 in progress.