The History of Java

1. The History of Java By: Drew Fleming

2. 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?

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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.”

7. 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

8. 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

9. *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.

10. 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.

11. 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

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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”