Success Quote by Bill Joy

A perfect little nerd-slap disguised as mild surprise: Bill Joy’s line is the sound of a Unix era where “businessman” could still mean “person who wrote the tools.” On the surface, he’s talking about vi landing inside System V, but the real payload is territorial. vi isn’t just an editor; it’s an identity marker, a workflow religion, a shibboleth you can type at speed. So the shock isn’t technical, it’s political: a once-academic, Berkeley-flavored tool suddenly showing up in the official, corporate Unix distribution.

The phrasing matters. “I was surprised” is performatively modest, the kind of understatement engineers use when they’re actually flagging a major shift in power. “I didn’t know it was in System V” frames adoption as rumor turning into fact, the moment when informal culture gets ratified by an institution. System V wasn’t merely a release train; it was AT&T’s stamp, the gravity well that pulled the ecosystem toward standardization, licensing, and vendor control. Seeing vi there suggests a détente: the scrappy, user-driven toolchain absorbed into the corporate canon.

There’s also a quiet flex in the specificity. Only insiders care about “System V” versus BSD lineage; dropping that distinction is a way of telling you who the sentence is for. It’s office-small talk as cultural history: a reminder that in computing, the most consequential moments often arrive as offhand remarks, when a tool crosses a boundary and a community realizes it no longer owns the narrative.