Sun's Bill Joy Sees a Beautiful Future, and It's Based on Unix
 
Copyright (c) 1989, McGraw-Hill, Inc.
NEW YORK (Microbytes Daily News Service) --- The Jacob Javits
Convention Center was filled with prophets expounding on the
future of Unix, but this impressed Sun Microsystems cofounder
Bill Joy not one bit. "There are people here talking about Unix
who know nothing, less than nothing, or what they know is wrong,"
Joy said in his plenary address at Unix Expo. The only speaker
preceding Joy was Ken Olsen, chairman of Digital Equipment Corp.
 
Bill Joy is as much a part of the history of Unix as his AT&T
contemporaries. As a graduate student at the University of
California at Berkeley, Joy worked for 7 years building AT&T's
32V Unix for DEC's VAX into what's now known as BSD. From there
he went straight to Sun. Under his direction, Sun struck up a
partnership (both technical and financial) with AT&T, the end
result of which is the new Unix System V Release 4. While Joy
acknowledged that Unix wasn't always as hot as it is now, he did
seem to think that V.4 is the only Unix anyone could need. In
fact, he said, "the question went from `If Unix?' to `Which
Unix?', and neither of these are any longer questionable."
 
As to "Which Unix?," Joy's answer would obviously be the version
developed by Sun and AT&T and offered by Unix International. This
jab at the Open Software Foundation went over very few heads in
the audience. OSF has yet to finalize which components will be
part of its version of Unix, so Unix International expects its
V.4 will be in widespread use long before OSF releases its
competing product.
 
According to Joy, the drive toward open systems was fought by
many of the people who are now visibly espousing it: DEC would
rather see the whole world running VMS, IBM still makes most of
its money on proprietary systems, and Apple thinks it can
reinvent the wheel and make it better than anyone else.
 
Sun has blazed some important trails in terms of open systems,
according to Joy. To be successful, Unix vendors must accept that
most of the innovation will come from outside their companies.
Sun has introduced some aggressive programs for drawing third-
party software developers, particularly to its SPARC platform.
Despite Joy's claim that other vendors seek to stifle outside
innovation, other companies, such as Hewlett-Packard and DEC,
have made similar strides toward cooperation with others.
 
 
The Future: Unix Taken for Granted
Joy's vision of the next decade is to have Unix taken for
granted. Conferences like Unix Expo won't be necessary any more
-- "You don't have shows for everything that runs on
electricity," he said -- and future gatherings will instead be
grouped by application types. The era of innovation in operating
systems is apparently over: "Operating systems are not the
frontier for the '90s," Joy said.
 
In hardware developments, every desk will be topped with systems
capable of producing realistic sound and video, he predicted. The
world's first 100-MIPS affordable desktop system will run Unix,
he said, and it will not have a monochrome display, an Intel
processor, or an AT bus; these are as good as dead, in Joy's
scenario. "It's clear to everyone that RISC is the next wave,"
and that technology will allow systems to double in performance
every year. "The [Sun] SPARCStation I is the first volume
platform for standard Unix," he said.
 
Joy described Unix as a grassroots movement. It was built by
technical people who cared about its future, and those same
people are responsible for its growing success, he said. It's
important that they not give in to political pressures and stand
up for quality and performance, he said.
 
Anyone who likes Unix doesn't mind taking a poke or two at MS-DOS
and OS/2, but Joy talked as though they don't exist, or, at
least, won't for much longer. However, Joy's claims about SPARC's
leadership role in open systems was not supported by evidence
here at Unix Expo. Only Sun and Solbourne were showing SPARC
machines. Every other booth with a System V.4 banner was showing
it on an Intel 386 or 486 or Motorola 88000.
 
Overall, though, Joy's vision for the '90s is attractive: Fast,
cheap computers with invisible operating systems, color graphics
and real-time sound, capable of sharing network data and
applications transparently. Attainable or not, this vision
embodies the original promise of Unix.
 
                              --- Tom Yager
 
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