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Joy is born in Farmington Hills, Michigan, U.S.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Joy designed the basic pipeline of the UltraSparc-I and its multimedia processing features.
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Joy codesigned the Java processor architectures, and coauthored its programming-language specifications, helping to create a new object-oriented-programming language.
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Java was released and almost immediately integrated into early versions of the Netscape Navigator Web browser partly thanks to Joy's work.
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U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton appointed Joy as cochairman of the Presidential Information Technology Advisory Committee.
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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.
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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.
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Joy leaves Sun Microsystems with no definite plans to further his career or studies.
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Joy becomes a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a venture capital firm.
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The year the world will end according to Joy's predictions.
