Bill Joy Quotes

Most of the bright people don't work for you - no matter who you are.

Well, limbo is not a good place to be.

Systems are going to get a lot more sophisticated.

I had almost rewritten all of the display code for windows, and that was when I gave up.

You can't solve a problem with the management of technology with more technology.

What's your personal computer, anyways? Your personal computer should be something that's always on your person.

Interleaf is very nice. I expect there to be a lot of competition for programs like that.

I think Unix is a great system
especially for running data centers
because it is very mature, very reliable, very scalable. But when I want to go out and populate small devices, I think Java.

I started to write a new editor not too long ago and had it about half done after two days.

I got tired of people complaining that it was too hard to use UNIX because the editor was too complicated.

We can't simply do our science and not worry about the ethical issues.

I think it killed the performance on a lot of the systems in the Labs for years because everyone had their own copy of it, but it wasn't being shared, and so they wasted huge amounts of memory back when memory was expensive.

The fundamental problem with vi is that it doesn't have a mouse and therefore you've got all these commands.

Bitmap display is media compatible with dot matrix or laser printers.

The Open Source theorem says that if you give away source code, innovation will occur. Certainly, Unix was done this way ... However, the corollary states that the innovation will occur elsewhere. No matter how many people you hire. So the only way to get close to the state of the art is to give the people who are going to be doing the innovative things the means to do it. That's why we had built-in source code with Unix. Open source is tapping the energy that's out there.

You can drive a car by looking in the rear view mirror as long as nothing is ahead of you. Not enough software professionals are engaged in forward thinking.

Sometimes the easiest way to get something done is to be a little naive about it.

Document preparation systems will also require large screen displays.

So Chuck and I looked at that and we hacked on em for a while, and eventually we ripped the stuff out of em and put some of it into what was then called en, which was really ed with some em features.

And once an intelligent robot exists, it is only a small step to a robot species - to an intelligent robot that can make evolved copies of itself.

We have to encourage the future we want rather than trying to prevent the future we fear.

The standard definition of AI is that which we don't understand.

I think editors have to come out of a certain kind of community.

I remember right after Carter got elected, I was sitting in my apartment in Albany, CA, on a Saturday listening to people call Carter and ask stupid questions while I designed the screen editor.

Just about every computer on the market today runs Unix, except the Mac and nobody cares about it.

But no, I don't generally have trouble with spelling mistakes.

I think the wonderful thing about vi is that it has such a good market share because we gave it away.

Take responsibility for the things you build and invent.

I think the hard thing about all these tools is that it takes a fair amount of effort to become proficient.

That lack of programmability is probably what ultimately will doom vi. It can't extend its domain.

There are always more smart people outside your company than within it.

But with Interleaf I don't even have a spell program.

The reason I use ed is that I don't want to lose what's on the screen.

I was surprised about vi going in, though, I didn't know it was in System V.

Operating systems are like underwear - nobody really wants to look at them.

Not all smart people work at Sun Microsystems.

Interleaf is based on the formatting process.