Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Who is sometimes referred to as the Edison of the Internet according to Outliers: The Story of Success? Why? Name one program he wrote.

Malcolm Gladwell refers to this computer engineer in chapter 2, "The 10,000 Hour Rule":

Among Silicon Valley insiders, Joy is spoken of with as much awe as someone like Bill Gates of Microsoft. He is sometimes called the Edison of the Internet. As the Yale computer scientist David Gelernter says, "Bill Joy is one of the most influential people in the modern history of computing."

At the University of Michigan in 1971, Bill Joy came across the Computer Center as a 16-year-old freshman. The University of Michigan had one of the most advanced computer science programs in the world, and Joy began programming the year that it opened. Computer programming became Joy's life, and he used every opportunity to engage in his craft.
Bill Joy worked with a small group of programmers to overwrite UNIX, a mainframe computer software system developed by AT&T. For decades, Joy's version of UNIX was used by millions of computers around the world. Since Gladwell's book was released 11 years ago, operating systems associated with Macintosh and Microsoft now use their own versions of UNIX-like systems.
After graduating from Berkeley, Bill Joy cofounded Sun Microsystems, a Silicon Valley company that played a critical role in the Computer Revolution. The Computer Revolution or the Digital Revolution featured personal computers linked to the Internet and the World Wide Web. Joy placed his UNIX version at the forefront of the digitization movement. Joy is also known for having rewritten Java, a computer programming language. Upon its release in 1995, Java was integrated into early versions of the Netscape Navigator web browser.
Bill Joy and his computer programming thrived for multiple reasons. He had access to state-of-the-art technology, some of the best in the world. Gladwell notes the importance of opportunity in the generation of success. Joy had the intelligence and talent for coding. He utilized those skills to become an expert, devoting over 10,000 hours to his craft. There was also an element of luck involved, in the sense that Joy had developed his expertise at the perfect time before the Digital Revolution. The context of Joy's success lies in the open-source movement, which allows anyone to obtain and modify open-source code. Through this philosophy, programmers write and exchange programming code for software development.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Bill-Joy

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