Success Quote by Bill Joy

“Document preparation systems will also require large screen displays” has the clean, mildly bossy certainty of early Silicon Valley futurism: a prediction that pretends to be a mere engineering note. Bill Joy isn’t selling wonder here; he’s normalizing a direction of travel. The line treats “will” as inevitability, not preference, which is how tech reshapes behavior without sounding ideological. If your tools “require” something, then the user’s job is to adapt.

The specific intent is pragmatic: serious writing, layout, and editing demand visual real estate. This comes from an era when screens were cramped, expensive, and often text-only. A “document preparation system” wasn’t today’s frictionless Google Docs; it was closer to typesetting, technical publishing, and the professionalization of text. Joy is quietly arguing that computing’s center of gravity is moving from computation-as-calculation to computation-as-composition: the computer as a desk, not a calculator.

The subtext is status and control. “Large screen displays” signal an office-bound workstation culture, the kind that budgets for equipment and expects you to sit with it. Before laptops and phones made screens portable, size was power: more pixels meant more context, fewer mistakes, and faster throughput. This is also a subtle bet on interface design: once you can see more, you can demand richer formatting, multiple panes, WYSIWYG layouts, and, inevitably, more complex software.

In hindsight, the prediction lands with a twist. Screens did get bigger, but “large” also became plural: dual monitors, ultrawides, and, at the same time, the phone in your pocket. Joy’s line captures the moment when writing stopped being a typewriter activity and became a UI problem.