A little history

Java did not start as a language called Java. In the early 1990s, the company Sun Microsystems, known for its SPARC workstations and the Solaris operating system, saw potential in the consumer electronics space. They put together a team of engineers to develop products in this space under the title Green Project. Their first device was called the Star7, a small handheld computer that used a custom version of Solaris. The Star7 is the first personal digital assistant, preceding the Apple Newton by a year. As part of the development of Star7, a language was created. James Gosling, a Canadian software engineer working for Sun, led a team that developed this new language for the Star7, called Oak. The Star7 never went into production, but Oak was destined to take over the world.

One of the consumer electronics targets Sun hoped that the Star7 could be used for was set-top boxes for the cable TV industry. They set up a company called FirstPerson and made a bid to develop a set-top box for the cable provider Time Warner. They lost the bid. While they were unsuccessful in bringing the Star7 to market, they saw potential in the Oak language. The only problem was that Oak was already trademarked.

There are numerous stories about how Oak became Java. Was it named after their favorite beverage or an island in Indonesia? Java was just 1 of 12 possible names. The names were turned over to the legal department for trademark searches. Of the names on the list given to the legal team, Java was the fourth name on the list and the first to pass the legal review. Java became the new name for Oak.

The early 1990s was also the time that the World Wide Web (WWW) became available to anyone with an internet connection. The Green team developed a browser called WebRunner coded with Java as a showcase for the language. This browser could run programs called Applets, which were written in Java. Java 1.0 was introduced to the world in 1995, and WebRunner was renamed HotJava. Netscape also licensed Java for their Navigator browser.

In 1998 Java 1.2, also referred to as Java 2, was introduced. Among many new features was the Swing GUI library, which significantly improved writing desktop GUI programs that ran independently from a browser. The Java EE platform was released in 1999 as J2EE. It was used to develop Java web servers. Now, you could write Java programs that responded to requests from a browser and were run on a web server. The rest, as the expression goes, is history.