William N. ("Bill") Joy, Jr. earned respect as one of the first technology "gurus" associated with the early days of the computer industry in Silicon Valley. Joy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, possessed a unique understanding of the complexities of the UNIX operating system, an understanding that was rivaled only by the original developers of the system at AT&T. Indeed so acute was Joy's comprehension of the intricacies of UNIX that his own modified version of UNIX competed against and ultimately overshadowed the original AT&T version of the system.

Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1954, the first of three children, Joy was an extremely precocious child, reading stories back to his parents at age three and studying advanced mathematics at age five. Although he entered kindergarten by age four, he was emphatically bored with elementary school. So keen was his displeasure that his teachers feared that he...