The talk then explores the new developments in distributed heterogeneous networking -- involving Jini -- Sun's vision for the future of networks.

Bill Joy is the co-founder and current Vice President for Research at Sun Microsystems, Inc. He is researching new architectures for human-computer interaction, involving new kinds of interfaces, new system and application software architectures and new ways of storing information to make information systems more agreeable to use. Joy was the principal designer of the University of California, Berkeley, version of the UNIX operating system whose networking protocols and implementations helped spawn the Internet. In the 1980s he spearheaded Sun's evangelism of the "open systems" model of computing which allows different groups to contribute design by making the specifications of its components freely available. In the last year he has led the basic design investigations for UltraSparc-IV, negotiated Sun's contract with Netscape for Java and driven the technical team that specified Java Applets and the release 1 version of the Java Programming Language. Joy holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan and a M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley. He holds a Lifetime Achievement Award from the USENIX Association and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery.