The History of Java

By: Drew Fleming

Before I Start Teaching You Guys

Important things to keep in mind Java is not the next step in C++ progression

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 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

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. This resulted in John Gage and others formed

a project called Green Offsite from Sun Top secret $1,000,000

The Green Project

WTF do we do now? They had no real plan in mind to begin with They knew Microsoft owned the PC market

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

Wanted to make them work together

The Juices are Now Flowing

Official Goal “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++ Most popular Designed for Speed However it was easy to break Consumers would flip if their TV remote

crashed Reliability>Speed

Gosling needed something new

Oak

Gosling had been working on a C++ replacement already named after a tree outside his office window. “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

Why make a device that makes my device easier to use? IT MAKES NO SENSE they said.

However, interactive TV’s were getting attention 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. 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 No memory access, no explicit garbage

collection helped to make software more reliable that C++. Added multithreading and automatic garbage collection.

Secure 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 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 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”