History of Java: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 20:42, 7 February 2005

Revision as of 05:13, 8 February 2005

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In June and July of [[1994]], after a 3 day brainstorming session with John Gage, James Gosling, Bill Joy, Patrick Naughton, Wayne Rosing, and Eric Schmidt, the team re-targeted yet again its efforts, this time to use the technology for the [[Internet]]. They felt that with the advent of the [[Mosaic (browser)|Mosaic]] browser, the Internet was on its way to evolving into the same highly interactive vision that they had had for the cable TV network. Patrick Naughton wrote a small web browser, WebRunner, as a prototype. WebRunner would later be renamed [[HotJava]].

It was also in 1994 that Oak was renamed '''Java'''. An IP ([[intellectual property]]) search revealed that Oak had already been trademarked forby anothera languagevideo adaptor card manufacturer so the team searched for a new name. The name Java was coined at a local coffee shop frequented by some of the members. It is not clear whether the name is an acronym or not. Most likely, it is not, however some accounts claim that it stands for the names of '''J'''ames Gosling, '''A'''rthur '''V'''an Hoff, and '''A'''ndy Bechtolsheim. Others, that it is an acronym for '''J'''ust '''A'''nother '''V'''ague '''A'''cronym.

In October of 1994, HotJava and the Java platform was demoed for Sun executives. Java 1.0a was made available for download in 1994, but the first public release of Java and the HotJava [[web browser]] came on [[May 23]], [[1995]], at the SunWorld conference. The announcement was made by John Gage, the Director of Science for Sun Microsystems. His announcement was accompanied by a surprise announcement by [[Marc Andreessen]], Executive Vice President of [[Netscape_Communications_Corporation|Netscape]], that Netscape would be including Java support in its browsers.