Java Announced — Sun Microsystems

Java is the programming language Sun Microsystems announced on 23 May 1995. It grew out of Sun's internal Green project, begun in December 1990, and its designer was James Gosling. The language Gosling wrote for a handheld consumer device was called Oak; in early 1995 it was renamed Java because Oak could not be cleared as a trademark. The formal announcement came at Sun's SunWorld show, alongside the HotJava web browser. The finished Java 1.0 (JDK 1.0) was released free on 23 January 1996.

So "when was Java created?" has no single answer. Work on the language began around 1991, the name arrived in 1995, and the product was finished in 1996. This article takes those steps in order.

The Green project and Oak

By Gosling's own account, the Green project was started in December 1990 by Patrick Naughton, Mike Sheridan and himself. Its charter was to work out what the "next wave" of computing would be and how Sun might catch it. The team concluded early that one wave would be the convergence of digitally controlled consumer devices and computers.

The deliverables they chose were not papers but working prototypes and a business plan. In April 1991 the group moved off-site to an office on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, and there built the Star7 (*7), a handheld device with a five-inch colour LCD, a touchscreen and wireless networking. Sun's 1998 retrospective says the team, fully staffed at 13 people, cut regular communication with the rest of the company for 18 months.

The software on the Star7 ran on a language Gosling had written for it: Oak, named, the retrospective says, after the tree outside his window. Listing what Green produced, Gosling described the language as small, safe, secure, distributed, robust, interpreted, garbage collected, multi-threaded, architecture neutral and dynamic. Much of Java's later sales pitch is already in that list. The Star7 demo was finished on 3 September 1992.

From cable television to the Internet

Operating as FirstPerson, the team pitched its technology to the cable-TV set-top box and video-on-demand industries, which were still unsure of their business models. Nothing came of it. Gosling later recalled that the cable companies "didn't want to lose that much control" over their networks.

The turn came at a three-day meeting near Lake Tahoe, where John Gage, Gosling, Bill Joy, Naughton, Wayne Rosing and Eric Schmidt settled on the Internet. Mosaic had made the web usable by ordinary people in 1993, and the web was exactly the kind of network the team had been urging cable companies to build. In 1994 the team wrote a Mosaic-like browser in Oak called WebRunner. Pages could now contain things that moved and responded to the user — the seed of what would be called applets. WebRunner was later renamed HotJava.

Why Oak became Java

The rename was a legal necessity. In a 1996 JavaWorld group interview, Sun engineer Frank Yellin said that "The lawyers had told us that we couldn't use the name 'OAK'", because it was already trademarked. About ten candidates went to the legal department, and three came back clean: Java, DNA and Silk. Eric Schmidt, then Sun's chief technology officer, placed the decision at one of Sun's regular operating reviews in early 1995. Those involved do not agree on who first suggested Java.

23 May 1995: SunWorld

Events moved fast after the rename. Sun's 1998 retrospective says the alpha source code (1.0a2) was posted on the web by March 1995, and downloads ran into the thousands within months. The January 1996 Java 1.0 announcement likewise refers to the first alpha release to the web "in March".

The formal announcement was part of the keynote at SunWorld on 23 May. Sun's press release that day described Java as a "revolutionary new object-oriented programming environment for the Internet" and introduced the HotJava browser with it. The alpha was free for SunOS, Solaris and Windows NT, with Windows 95 and MacOS 7.5 ports promised for late summer. The release also noted that an advanced-technology division of Toshiba in Tokyo was working with Java for online publishing.

According to the retrospective, Sun and Netscape had reached agreement to build Java into Navigator only hours earlier, around 4 a.m. During the keynote Marc Andreessen of Netscape walked on stage and announced it. That deal also set off something on the Netscape side: Navigator would carry a scripting language to complement Java, and that became JavaScript, later the same year.

Java 1.0: 23 January 1996

The finished release came from JavaSoft, newly formed as Sun's Java operating company. According to the announcement of 23 January 1996, Java 1.0 was a free download from java.sun.com and contained the following.

It ran on Windows 95 and NT on Intel and on Solaris for SPARC, with a Mac OS 7.5 version expected by the end of the first quarter of 1996. By then 15 companies, including IBM, SGI, Netscape, Oracle and Toshiba, had licensed the Java source, and Microsoft had said it intended to. Only the virtual machine needed porting to each platform; the release went as far as claiming the end of porting applications. JavaSoft's president Alan Baratz called this Java's "write-once-run-everywhere capability".

Afterwards

The language was codified in The Java Language Specification (1996) by Gosling, Bill Joy and Guy Steele. Its introduction defines Java as a general-purpose, concurrent, class-based, object-oriented language, related to C and C++ but organised rather differently, with some of their features omitted and a few ideas from other languages added. Being meant for production rather than research, it avoided new and untested features. Memory is managed automatically, typically by garbage collection, with no explicit deallocation like C's free or C++'s delete, and there are no unsafe constructs such as unchecked array access. Programs are normally compiled to machine-independent bytecode.

Sun ceased to be independent when Oracle completed its acquisition on 27 January 2010, and stewardship of Java passed to Oracle. Java's place among its contemporaries is on the programming-languages timeline, and its role on the web on the Internet and web timeline.