History of Java: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 12:22, 6 March 2002

Revision as of 12:26, 6 March 2002

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The device was named '''Star7''' after a telephone feature activated by '''*7''' on a telephone keypad. The feature enabled users to answer the telephone anywhere. The PDA device itself was demonstrated on September 3, 1992.

In November of that year, the Green Project was spun off to become a wholly owned subsidary of Sun Microsystems, called '''FirstPerson, Inc.'''. The team relocated to Palo Alto. The FirstPerson team was interested in building highly interactive devices and when Time-Warner issued an RFP for a set top box, FirstPerson changed their target and responded with a proposal for set top box platform. However, the cable industry felt that their platform gave too much control to the user and FirstPerson lost their bid to SGI. An additional deal with 3DO for a set top box also failed materialize. FirstPerson was unable to generate any interest within the cable TV industry for their platform. Following their failurefailures, the company, FirstPerson, was rolled back into Sun.

In June and July of 1994, after a 3 day brain storm 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, 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 to HotJava.