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.

He has once said "My method is to look at something that seems like a good idea and assume it's true". He played an integral role in the early development of BSD UNIX while a graduate student at Berkeley and he is the original author of the vi text editor.

Joy co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla Scott McNealy and Andreas von BechtolBill Joyim and served as chief scientist at the company until 2003. He also wrote the essay "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" in which he expressed deep concerns over the development of modern technologies.