Wired magazine has posted an interview with Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy. In the course of the interview Joy muses about the state of technology, software development and the world at large. Joy also offers a nice plug for his Mac and Mac OS X.
“I just got a new Mac with two 2-gigahertz processors, 8 gigabytes of memory, and a half a terabyte of internal disk,” he said, describing his Power Mac G5. “… So you have the ability to hold a huge simulation all in memory — a database becomes a data structure. Add 64-bit computing and I can do breathtaking visualization.”
Joy goes on to criticize Microsoft operating systems (without directly naming them) and points to the importance of reliable and secure systems. When the interviewer asks Joy about his “famously cool” attitude towards Linux, Joy responded, “Re-implementing what I designed in 1979 is not interesting to me personally. For kids who are 20 years younger than me, Linux is a great way to cut your teeth. It’s a cultural phenomenon and a business phenomenon. Mac OS X is a rock-solid system that’s beautifully designed. I much prefer it to Linux.”
Then again, perhaps there’s some parental hubris behind Joy’s comments: Among his other accomplishments, Joy is credited with coding Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix, the core underpinnings upon which Mac OS X is based.