"bill_joy_-_why_does_the_future_not_need_us" - читать интересную книгу автора (Joy Bill)

the night of Gene Roddenberry's original Star Trek, and the program made a big
impression on me. I came to accept its notion that humans had a future in space,
Western-style, with big heroes and adventures. Roddenberry's vision of the
centuries to come was one with strong moral values, embodied in codes like the
Prime Directive: to not interfere in the development of less technologically
advanced civilizations. This had an incredible appeal to me; ethical humans, not
robots, dominated this future, and I took Roddenberry's dream as part of my own.

I excelled in mathematics in high school, and when I went to the University of
Michigan as an undergraduate engineering student I took the advanced curriculum
of the mathematics majors. Solving math problems was an exciting challenge, but
when I discovered computers I found something much more interesting: a
machine into which you could put a program that attempted to solve a problem,
after which the machine quickly checked the solution. The computer had a clear
notion of correct and incorrect, true and false. Were my ideas correct? The
machine could tell me. This was very seductive.

I was lucky enough to get a job programming early supercomputers and
discovered the amazing power of large machines to numerically simulate advanced
designs. When I went to graduate school at UC Berkeley in the mid-1970s, I
started staying up late, often all night, inventing new worlds inside the machines.
Solving problems. Writing the code that argued so strongly to be written.

InThe Agony and the Ecstasy, Irving Stone's biographical novel of Michelangelo,
Stone described vividly how Michelangelo released the statues from the stone,
"breaking the marble spell," carving from the images in his mind.4 In my most
ecstatic moments, the software in the computer emerged in the same way. Once I
had imagined it in my mind I felt that it was already there in the machine, waiting
to be released. Staying up all night seemed a small price to pay to free it - to
give the ideas concrete form.

After a few years at Berkeley I started to send out some of the software I had
written - an instructional Pascal system, Unix utilities, and a text editor called vi
(which is still, to my surprise, widely used more than 20 years later) - to others
who had similar small PDP-11 and VAX minicomputers. These adventures in
software eventually turned into the Berkeley version of the Unix operating
system, which became a personal "success disaster" - so many people wanted it
that I never finished my PhD. Instead I got a job working for Darpa putting
Berkeley Unix on the Internet and fixing it to be reliable and to run large research
applications well. This was all great fun and very rewarding. And, frankly, I saw no
robots here, or anywhere near.

Still, by the early 1980s, I was drowning. The Unix releases were very successful,
and my little project of one soon had money and some staff, but the problem at
Berkeley was always office space rather than money - there wasn't room for the
help the project needed, so when the other founders of Sun Microsystems showed
up I jumped at the chance to join them. At Sun, the long hours continued into the
early days of workstations and personal computers, and I have enjoyed
participating in the creation of advanced microprocessor technologies and Internet
technologies such as Java and Jini.