"Among Joy's list of achievements are BSD Unix, NFS, UltraSPARC designs and some work on Java" - not to mention Berkley Sockets. But his greatest gift to man was vi? I think not!
Full disclosure: I'm an "emacs guy" but I don't care about the silly old emacs/vi wars. I would just say as awesome as people find vi to be, it's among the least of Bill's accomplishments. That's how awesome he is!
I don't know how much he was involved in the "3M" model that Sun pushed, but that was pretty big too: 1 Megabyte of memory, 1 megapixels on the screen, 1 Megabyte/sec network connection. All seems like nothing now, but at the time of the early Sun workstations, that was the definition of a high end machine.
I think more people should shoot for something like that.
I remember when tesla first created it's electric cars and they put these huge expensive batteries in them.
Other cars required an engineering degree to figure out how to get across town and back, and tesla had these cars that freed up your mind and let you drive. and then they could build on that with the supercharger network.
Eventually the range went up and the battery cost went down and the future was the present.
Full disclosure: I'm an "emacs guy" but I don't care about the silly old emacs/vi wars. I would just say as awesome as people find vi to be, it's among the least of Bill's accomplishments. That's how awesome he is!