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Birth
Joy is born in Farmington Hills, Michigan, U.S. -
Enrollment at Michigan
Joy enrolled as an electrical engineering undergraduate at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. There he worked on one of the earliest parallel-processing supercomputers ever made. -
Enrollment at Berkeley
After graduating at Michigan, Joy enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, to pursue a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science. There he quickly gained respect for helping to update the UNIX operating system that was running the school’s Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) computers. -
Free Software Distribution
Joy created the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), to distribute his work on Berkeley UNIX’s source code for free, allowing other programmers to learn and improve on the software. -
Major Funding
Joy and his UNIX team received funding from the federal government to devise software for the VAX computer that would allow it to link to the ARPANET network, a precursor of the Internet. -
Recruitment from the Sun
Entrepreneur Scott McNealy recruited Joy for a new start-up company that wished to create a high-powered version of UNIX for a small cheap desktop-computer workstation. The computer was called the Stanford University Network workstation, or S.U.N. for short, and the company eventually became Sun Microsystems. -
UltraSparc-I
Joy designed the basic pipeline of the UltraSparc-I and its multimedia processing features. -
A New Language
Joy codesigned the Java processor architectures, and coauthored its programming-language specifications, helping to create a new object-oriented-programming language. -
The Release of Java
Java was released and almost immediately integrated into early versions of the Netscape Navigator Web browser partly thanks to Joy's work. -
A Presidential Appointment
U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton appointed Joy as cochairman of the Presidential Information Technology Advisory Committee. -
Creation of Connectivity
Joy was appointed Sun’s chief technologist, and he worked on new forms of distributed computing using Java and a related technology called Jini, which embedded slivers of tiny Java applications into devices such as printers and cell phones to enable Internet connectivity. -
Doom's Day Warning
Joy, with the help of Wired Magazine, published an essay titled, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” in which he argues that computer technology has the potential to destroy humanity. -
The End of an Era
Joy leaves Sun Microsystems with no definite plans to further his career or studies. -
A New Partner
Joy becomes a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a venture capital firm. -
The End of the World
The year the world will end according to Joy's predictions.
