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Cndnsd Vrsn: 4 PM Tuesday November 2 at NIST - Bill Joy's Journey
from BSD to Jini.
The November meeting of the Front Range UNIX Users Group will be held at
4:00 P.M. on Tuesday November 2 in the
main auditorium at the U.S. Department of Commerce building (also known
as NIST) at 325 S. Broadway in Boulder. (Details on
the meeting location are below.) This meeting is co-sponsored by the
National Telecommunications and Information Administration
(NTIA, http://www.ntia.doc.gov) /
Institute for Telecommunication Sciences
(ITS, http://ntia.its.bldrdoc.gov/).
Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, will discuss the journey
from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) of UNIX to the
development of Jini technology.
Bill helped to create the BSD UNIX distributions 20 years ago,
and widely distributed the source. The most
notable technical contribution of BSD was a high-performance
and well-debugged implementation of TCP/IP. This became
the widely-used benchmark for TCP/IP on the internet
because the code was available in source form.
Sun started shortly thereafter, and pioneered the notion
of "open system", with public interfaces but proprietary
implementations, a big advance over the proprietary
systems of the time.
Now, with Jini, Sun is both making the source code
widely available, but also promoting a new way of
distributing protocols: namely by shipping "agents"
(objects which implement a protocol around), by structuring
distributed systems as object/agent based systems.
This technical approach allows us to skip several steps:
it is no longer necessary to write human-language protocol descriptions
and implement them separately and then debug compatibility
in order to distribute new functionality and protocols.
This promises to greatly increase the rate of innovation
in deployed services on the network.
This talk will discuss the reasons why the TCP/IP distribution
was successful, the motivation for sharing the source
of Berkeley UNIX in the way we did, and the similar reasons
that Sun is optimistic about Jini. It will also discuss
the thinking behind the Sun Community Source License, the
Java Community Process, the Jini Community, and how
these provide new opportunities for sharing and working
together effectively in the age of the net.
Bill Joy is Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, Inc., and is
a co-founder of the company.
Bill received a B.S.E.E. in Electrical Engineering from the University of
Michigan in 1975, after which he attended graduate school at U.C. Berkeley
where he was the principal designer of Berkeley UNIX (BSD) and received
a M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The Berkeley
version of UNIX became the standard in education and research, garnering
development support from DARPA, and was notable for introducing virtual
memory and internetworking using TCP/IP to UNIX. BSD was widely
distributed in source form so that others could learn from it and improve
it; this style of software distribution has now led to the "open source"
movement, of which BSD is now recognized to be one of the earliest examples.
Since joining Sun from Berkeley in 1982, he has led Sun's technical
strategy, spearheading its open systems philosophy. He designed Sun's
Network File System (NFS), and was a co-designer of the SPARC
microprocessor Architecture. In 1991 he did the basic pipeline design
of UltraSPARC-I and its multimedia processing features. This basic
pipeline is the one used in all of Sun's SPARC microprocessors
shipping today.
Bill has led design investigations of architectures for
UltraSPARC V, driven the initial business and technical strategy for
Java, co-designed the picoJava and ultraJava processor architectures,
co-authored the specification for the Java Programming Language,
and co-designed the lexical scoping and reflection APIs for Java
version 1.1.
In 1997, Joy was appointed by President Clinton as Co-Chairman of the
Presidential Information Technology Advisory Committee. The Advisory
Committee is providing guidance and advice on all areas of
high-performance computing, communications and information technologies
to accelerate development and adoption of information technologies
that will be vital for American prosperity in the twenty-first century.
The report of the committee is available at
http://www.hpcc.gov/ac.
Bill has developed the Jini distributed computing technology
for networking computer devices using Java. His current research
interests include
new uses of distributed computing enabled using Java
and Jini, new methods of human-computer interaction, new microprocessor
and system architectures, and the uses in computing of scientific
advances in areas such as complex adaptive systems, quantum computing,
and the cognitive sciences.
Bill is also working on the Sun Community Source
Licensing (SCSL) model
(http://www.sun.com/jini),
designed to allow companies to share their
intellectual property in source form, to facilitate cooperation with
customers, partners, educators and researchers.
The U.S. Department of commerce building is at the corner of 27th Way
and Broadway in Boulder. The auditorium is in the main building that
faces the entrance and is marked (1) on the map.
Note that you will have to take
Compton road to the right just after you enter the complex and follow
the signs to visitor parking towards the rear of the building. Please
allow some extra time for parking.
For those who are unfamiliar with the NIST location, driving directions
are available at:
http://www.boulder.nist.gov/maps.htm.
At our October Meeting, Peter Honeyman, director of the Center for
Information Technology Integration (CITI) at the University of Michigan
discussed his group's smart card-related research and development,
including innovative computer security applications (like Kerberos),
and new methods of interacting with smart cards (for example, as a
mounted UNIX file system).
The complete write-up of Peter's talk, including pointers
to his presentations, is available at
http://www.fruug.org/mtgarchive/index.html.
Our next meeting is scheduled for Thursday, December 2 at our
usual location. We're planning to have a panel "stump the experts"
question-and-answer session on UNIX system administration issues,
as well as a discussion on the possibility of forming a local USENIX
SAGE group in Boulder.
Because this meeting will be held at the NIST auditorium, FRUUG
library books will not be accessible to us. If you have a book
to return, you're welcome to bring it to this meeting.
We have three new books from Addison Wesley this month:
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Interconnections Second Edition, Bridges, Routers, Switches, and
Internetworking Protocols, by Radia Perlman
-
Extreme Programming Explained, by Kent Beck
-
Object-Oriented Network Protocols, by Stefan Boecking
You may check books out using your business card as your library card;
you must be on the membership list to check books out. Books are due at the
meeting following the one in which they are checked out. If you don't
return your library books by the next meeting, you might find
yourself on our overdue book list.
We count on you returning books on time so that other members
may have the chance to use them as well.
Remember that your FRUUG membership entitles you to 20% off
books from O'Reilly & Associates when ordered through their
toll-free number, (800) 998-9938. Mention discount code DSUG.
Last Updated: 19 October 1999
Problems? Contact our webmaster at fruug.org.
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