Bill Joy

Khosla, who today is a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, chuckles remembering his first meeting with Joy. "He ignored me and Scott and mostly did technical talk with Andy. I was spurned by him, and that made me want [to hire] him even more," Khosla said.

The rest is straight out of the Silicon Valley history books. Nearly 17 years later, Sun is an indisputable technology powerhouse. Like Khosla, Bechtolscheim left the company, and today McNealy is the only member of the original quartet leading Sun from its headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif.

That is not to say that Joy also has departed,in fact, he is telecommuting from Aspen, Colo. Joy, burned out by the worsening traffic and punishing grind of life in the Valley, approached McNealy years ago and said he was moving on, sources said. McNealy told Joy he would do whatever he could to keep him happy, and shortly thereafter, Sun's chief scientist was setting up a new home in the Rockies with his wife, Sara, and two children, a 6-year-old boy and a 3-year-old girl.

Joy is an accomplished skier. "I invited him to go skiing this one time, and they had one of the worst snowstorms ever in [Lake] Tahoe," said Ed Zander, president and chief operating officer of Sun. "He took me out on 12 inches of powder, and I nearly died [keeping up with him]." But Zander was not talking only about Joy's black-diamond prowess when he said, "I continue to be amazed by his capabilities and range."

Indeed, there must be something in the cold, crisp mountain air, as technology visions continue to issue forth from Joy's fertile mind. He is the industry's oracle, with a unique specialty: divining technologies years before they enter the collective computing consciousness.

Joy's myriad accomplishments include leading the design of one of the earliest examples of open-source development, Berkeley Unix; creating Sun's Network File System, which propelled forward the then-revolutionary notion of distributed computing; and contributing to the architecture of Sun's SPARC chip. His work developing the basic pipeline design of the UltraSPARC-1 formed the foundation of all SPARC microprocessors the company manufactures today.

Of course, then there's Java.

The developers that have embraced the programming environment since its launch several years ago speak reverently of Joy's work there, even as they admit they have little sense of the man himself.

"Bill told me in 1988 about why a language like Java would come along and why it would be important," said Bill Raduchel, who earlier this fall left Sun, where he served most recently as chief strategy officer, and joined America Online Inc. as its new chief technology officer. "I have never met anybody who can explain how computing has to evolve better than Bill can."

Dion Hinchcliffe, manager of technology development for T. Rowe Price Associates Inc.'s application architecture group, said Joy's development work has enabled more efficient coding of enterprise applications.

"You are so focused on bit-tooling with C++ that you can't focus on business problems," Hinchcliffe said, pointing out that the fund manager has deployed several major Java applications and is evaluating whether to move to Java 2 Enterprise Edition, slated for release next month.

"Java is also really portable. We have a heterogeneous environment, and our C++ code stays on AIX, [but] with Java we can drop [objects] on servers and it works," said Hinchcliffe, a certified Java developer who has worked with the language since its inception.

"I grew up on [Joy's] code," said Mike Leo, a product architect at Caribou Lake Software, Minneapolis. "I really admire him technically. I don't know what kind of person he is, but I started reading his code when I was 19 or 20 to learn how to program the Berkeley Unix way."

Joy's colleagues invariably say they, too, have learned from him, sometimes by osmosis. "When I came out for the [job] interview, Andy and Bill said, 'Let's go out to dinner,' " Zander said. "I came out of dinner and my IQ went up 10 points. I said to my wife, 'I don't know what they are talking about, but they sure are smart.' "

Kim Polese, another Berkeley alumni and now chief executive of Marimba Inc., worked with Joy at the university on object-oriented programming. "There are no airs or pretenses about Bill," Polese said. "I admire that in someone who has accomplished so much. Most people at the stage he's at would be floating in a pool somewhere, living a life of leisure, and he is just the opposite."

Joy has a simple vision of where computing will go. Take Jini, the Java-based technology that lets pagers, handheld computers and other devices communicate over networks. It is not his main focus, and it has not gathered the same momentum that Java has, but Jini,and the community source architecture model fostering its growth,hints at the future of data communications.

While cell phones and other devices may not know now "what room they are in or what city they are in, they are becoming more aware of their environment," Joy said. New layers of software above the Jini code could provide greater mobility, "so you could have things wandering around the Net without being asked to," Joy said.

Luckily, Joy does not appear to be plotting his escape to the aforementioned swimming pool any time soon.

"I have a few more things I want to do," Joy said. "I still think the tools we have for building reliable software are inadequate." And with that, he went back to his drawing board in the mountains.