INTERVIEW WITH BILL JOY (UNIX REVIEW, 1984)

The following interview is taken from the August 1984 issue of
Unix Review magazine (which briefly changed its name to
Performance Computing, but then dropped out of print and later
went to an online-only format at www.unixreview.com).

The original unixreview.com site no longer exists.

This plain text version was converted from a scanned archival PDF
for personal study, historical preservation, and reference.

Original interview:
    "Interview with Bill Joy"
    By Jim Joyce
    Unix Review Magazine
    August 1984

Preserved in plain text format to remain accessible with standard
Unix tools and simple text viewers.


Interview with Bill Joy
By Jim Joyce


Bill Joy is one of those rare people who can carry on a rapid-fire
technical conversation while coding at the keyboard. His seemingly
inexhaustible energy has produced the C shell command interpreter,
the vi screen editor and the Berkeley paging kernel, among other
accomplishments. UNIX REVIEW sent Jim Joyce to Sun Microsystems,
where Joy is Vice President in charge of Research and Development,
to capture some of this energy.


REVIEW: How did vi come about?

JOY: It's an interesting story. I came to Berkeley in '75 as a
theory student and got involved with Mike Harrison working on
general context-free parsing algorithms, so I tried to write the
thing in Pascal because Pascal had sets, which Ken Thompson had
permitted to be of arbitrary length.

The program worked, but it was almost 200 lines long - almost too
big for the Pascal system.

I talked to Thompson to figure out how I could make the Pascal
system handle this program. Chuck Haley and I got involved in
trying to make the Pascal system handle it, but the thing was wrong
because it was building the entire thing in core.

So I got sucked in, got department help, and built some hope of
receiving enough support eventually to pay for this program to work
under Pascal.

But while we were doing that, we were sort of hacking around on ed
just to add things. Chuck came in late one night and put in open
mode - where you can move the cursor on the bottom line of the CRT.

Then George Coulouris from Queen Mary College came to Berkeley and
brought along this thing called em, which stood for "editor for
mortals."

It had two error messages instead of one. It had a prompt, and its
own strange version of open modes done for ITT terminals, which
really didn't work very well on ADM-3As.

So Chuck and I looked at that and we hacked on em for a while, and
eventually we ripped the stuff out of em and put some of it into
what was then called en, which was really ed with some em features.

Chuck would come in at night - we really didn't work exactly the
same hours although we overlapped in the afternoon. I'd break the
editor and he'd fix it and then he'd break it and I'd fix it.

I got really big into writing manual pages, so I wrote manual pages
for all the great features we were going to do but never
implemented.

Eventually Chuck graduated with his Ph.D. for his part of the
Pascal system. After he left, there was ex Version 0.1 at the
Computer Center.

There was a version of the editor from EP016, which stood for
September 1, '76, the date that the binary was created - after
which we promptly lost the source because we were making so many
changes and didn't have SCCS.

Really, what started it all was that we got some ADM-3As to do
screen editing.

I remember right after Carter got elected, I was sitting in my
apartment in Albany, CA, on a Saturday listening to people call
Carter and ask stupid questions while I designed the screen editor.

That dates it: it was probably '76.

It was really a consequence of our initial frustration with Pascal.
It went on from there.

I stopped working on it whenever they made the reference cards -
'78 - '79 - and I really haven't worked on it for five years.


REVIEW: What would you do differently?

JOY: I wish we hadn't used all the keys on the keyboard.

I think one of the interesting things is that vi is really a
mode-based editor.

I think as mode-based editors go, it is pretty good.

One of the good things about EMACS, though, is its programmability
and the modelessness. Those are two ideas which never occurred to
me.

I also wasn't very good at optimizing code when I wrote vi.

I think the redisplay module of the editor is almost intractable.

It does a really good job for what it does, but when you're writing
programs as you're learning... That's why I stopped working on it.

The fundamental problem with vi is that it doesn't have a mouse and
therefore you've got all these commands.

In some sense, it's backwards from the kind of thing you'd get from
a mouse-oriented thing.

I think multiple levels of undo would be wonderful, too.

But fundamentally, vi is still ed inside. You can't really fool it.

It's like one of those pinatas - things that have candy inside but
has layer after layer of paper mache on top.

It doesn't really have a unified concept.

I think if I were going to go back - I wouldn't go back, but start
over again.


REVIEW: You had said, when you were giving a demonstration earlier
today, that when you are on foreign systems you use ed.

JOY: That's right. Absolutely.


REVIEW: You don't even try to use vi?

JOY: I'm used to having a 24-line terminal with no ability to
scroll back.

The reason I use ed is that I don't want to lose what's on the
screen.

I used to have a Concept terminal which had eight pages of memory,
like a mini-version of a window system.

I just don't like to lose what's in the window.


REVIEW: Real programmers use cat as their editor.

JOY: That's right! There you go!

It is too much trouble to say ed, because cat's smaller and only
needs two pages of memory - plus you're not likely to get swapped
out.

That's why ed didn't prompt, you know. The performance of the
system was just horrible.

It would swap things out randomly and do all sorts of things.

In ed you might type "a", but have no idea how far behind the
system was.

And it didn't matter, as long as it didn't get more than a few
hundred characters behind and start throwing lines away without
telling you.


REVIEW: What are your views on make and SCCS?

JOY: I think make is the program that causes people to write the
things down that formerly were scribbled on the wall.

It's sort of the graffiti recorder.

That's the wonderful thing about it.

People don't use SCCS and make enough.


REVIEW: What about the future of interfaces?

JOY: I think the Macintosh proves that everyone can have a bitmapped
display.

The fundamental tension in UNIX that I think AT&T doesn't
understand is that everyone is going to have a bitmap.

With a mouse to point with, you've got sort of a baseline of
facilities around which you can build a document environment.

I think you also need a full-page display.

The neat thing about UNIX is that it is very responsive.

You just say, "A pipe to B" - it doesn't blather at you that
"execution begins."

The trouble is that UNIX is not accessible, not transparent in the
way that graphical systems are.

Systems are going to get a lot more sophisticated.

Things will tend to get lost unless the interfaces are done in the
Macintosh style.


REVIEW: What about portable systems?

JOY: You don't really want to have a telephone in the office or be
tied to an office.

You'd like to have the office with you and the phone with you.

I want to be able to turn the phone off, thank you.

I think that's going to require very different technology.


REVIEW: Like designer jeans?

JOY: I don't buy designer jeans - well, what I'm wearing aren't bad
jeans. They're my burlap sacks.

Wrinkles are in, you know.


END OF INTERVIEW


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Last Modified: 2026-05-09 00:00:00 UTC