According to a Salon article, during the early 1980s, DARPA had contracted the company Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) to add TCP/IP to Berkeley UNIX. Joy had been instructed to plug BBN's stack into Berkeley Unix, but he refused to do so, as he had a low opinion of BBN's TCP/IP. So, Joy wrote his own high-performance TCP/IP stack. According to John Gage:
" BBN had a big contract to implement TCP/IP, but their stuff didn't work, and grad student Joy's stuff worked. So they had this big meeting and this grad student in a T-shirt shows up, and they said, "How did you do this?" And Bill said, "It's very simple β you read the protocol and write the code."
neat
In terms of computing, Bill Joy devised a formula in 1983, also called Joy's law, stating that the peak computer speed doubles each year and thus is given by a simple function of time. Specifically,
S = 2 Y β 1984 S = 2Y-1984
in which S is the peak computer speed attained during year Y, expressed in MIPS.
