"I think it killed the performance on a lot of the systems in the Labs for years because everyone had their own copy of it, but it wasn't being shared, and so they wasted huge amounts of memory back when memory was expensive"

In this quote by Bill Joy, a popular computer system researcher and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, he's assessing a particular ineffectiveness in system resource management within a laboratory environment. This inadequacy came from individual copies of a program or data set being kept independently by each user, rather than being shared throughout a network or using a central repository.

Happiness emphasizes how each person having their own copy of a probably large piece of software or data was destructive to the efficiency of computer system systems in the lab. The term "eliminated the performance" suggests that this practice severely obstructed the system's performance and speed. Throughout the era Joy referrals, calculating resources, especially memory, were quite minimal and expensive. Unlike today, where digital storage is relatively cheap and abundant, back then, enhancing memory use was essential for keeping a high level of system efficiency.

The root problem here is the absence of sharing these resources. If a single shared instance of the software or data had been made available, the systems could have conserved significant amounts of memory. Instead, redundant copies led to "squandered" memory, suggesting that memory resources were being taken in needlessly, limiting the area available for other procedures and applications.

Happiness's reflection indicates a critique of the practices and maybe the technological restrictions of that time. It highlights the value of efficient resource management, that includes methods like using shared resources whenever possible to conserve important system resources like memory. In larger terms, his declaration can be seen as an early critique of ineffectiveness in software distribution and an advocacy for collaborative, networked options that later advancements in technology would make more practical.