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The History of Java
By: Drew Fleming
Before I Start Teaching You Guys
 Important things to keep in mind
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Java is not the next step in C++ progression
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Java was developed by Sun for Sun
Sun is not Bell Labs
Java’s syntax only looks like C++ because that
was the designers preference
Java was designed from the ground up
Any questions?
In the beginning
 We begin in 1990
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Hardly an internet as we know it
PC’s were getting more popular
Sun felt like it missed the personal pc bus
Patrick Naughton was about to quit but before
he did he wrote down everything he hated
about Sun and emailed it to the CEO
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CEO loved it and forwarded it to the whole
company
Everyone loved Naugton’s idea
In the Beginning
 Everyone loved to bitch so much a bunch of
high level engineers stayed up until 4:30AM
talking about how to turn it around.
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This resulted in John Gage and others formed
a project called Green
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Offsite from Sun
Top secret
$1,000,000
The Green Project
 WTF do we do now?
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They had no real plan in mind to begin with
They knew Microsoft owned the PC market
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Thus their new goal was to design software and
an environment that could run anywhere, even in
things people didn’t think of as computers
Noticed that computers were everywhere
 Toasters
 VCR’s
 Doors
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Wanted to make them work together
The Juices are Now Flowing
 Official Goal
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“To develop and license an operating
environment for consumer devices that
enables services and information to be
persuasively presented via the emerging
digital infrastructure.”
What Language Shall We Use
 C++
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Most popular
Designed for Speed
However it was easy to break
Consumers would flip if their TV remote
crashed
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Reliability>Speed
 Gosling needed something new
Oak
 Gosling had been working on a C++
replacement already named after a tree
outside his office window.
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“From the initial ‘Oh, f***’ to getting to a
reasonable state only too a few months.”
 Naughton was working on graphics
 Aug. 1991- The graphics were running
correctly on Oak
*7
 Used “hammer technology” to make a
‘remote control’ out of a sharp minitelevision,
touch screen, gameboy speakers, and a Sun
Sparc workstation.
 Hacked like mad to get Oak to work on it, and
finally did.
 Presented *7 to the CEO.
 He loved that so much.
FirstPerson
 Subsidiary of Sun to sell *7 to companies
 No one wanted to buy it
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Why make a device that makes my device
easier to use? IT MAKES NO SENSE they
said.
 However, interactive TV’s were getting
attention
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FirstPerson lost the bid at Time Warner, 3D0
FirstPerson was screwed.
Enter the Internet
 Sun supplied 50% of the host computers that
ran the internet. How did they miss that
market??
 A new plan for Oak was created by Bill Joy.
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Internet play- Giving away software to build a
market share
Oak renamed to Java after coffee
Naughton wrote an interpreter for a web
browser called HotJava
Why Java is Good
 Reliable
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No memory access, no explicit garbage
collection helped to make software more
reliable that C++. Added multithreading and
automatic garbage collection.
 Secure
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Designed to be secure because it was
designed to allow secure execution across a
network. Lots of unsafe thing that C++ used
had to be tossed.
Byte Code and Other Goodies
 Java was good for the web
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The precompiled byte code can fly around the
web, be device independent and run on any
machine that has the interpreter complied for
their computer.
 Most C++ errors were to do memory
allocation
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To eliminate this, Java does not have much of
this.
Thanks
Bank, David. "The Java Saga." 1993. 20 Apr. 2006
<www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.12/java.saga_pr.html>.
Byous, Jon. "Java Technology: the Early Years." 3 Apr. 2006. 20
Apr. 2006 <java.sun.com>.
Harold, Elliotte R. "What is Java." Comp.Lang.Java FAQ. 1995. 20
Apr. 2006 <www.ibiblio.org/javafaq/javafaq.html>.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation
License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article “Java
Programming Language”