Todays online issue of The New York Times has an interview with Bill Joy (free registration required to view). Bill Joy, the co-founder and former chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, left the company last September to "sit down and relax with a glass of wine and a blank sheet of paper," as he told a reporter. Joy's many contributions to computing include the vi editor, parts of BSD Unix, the Network File System, and, most recently, JXTA and other contributions to Java.
In 2000, Joy wrote a controversial article for Wired, titled "Why the future doesn't need us", where he predicted doom for mankind should the intelligent machines we are going to built in the not-so-far future some day decide that they do not need us any longer. The New York Times interview mostly focuses on similar topics.
Another interview with Bill Joy, this time by WIRED, is at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.12/billjoy.html . My favorite quite from it: "The ideal project is one where people don't have meetings, they have lunch."
Posted by: Guenter Obiltschnig at June 7, 2004 09:59 AM