Google News
logo
History of Java
History of Java
Before starting to learn java, let us plunge into its history and see how the language originated. In 1990, Sun Microsystems Inc. (Us) has conceived a project to develop software for consumer electronic devices that could be controlled by a remote (set-top boxes, television etc). This project was called stealth project but later its name was changed to Green project. 

In Jan of 1991, Bill Joy, James Gosling, Mike Sheradin, Patrick Naughton and several others met in Aspen, Colorado to discuss this project. 

James Gosling has to identify the proper programming language for this project. Gosling thought C and C++ could be used to develop the project. But the problem he faced with them is that they were system dependent languages and hence could not be used on various processors which the electronics devices might use. 

So James Gosling starts to develop a new language which was completely system independent. Firstly, it was called "Green talk" by James Gosling and file extension was ‘.gt’. After that, it was called Oak, since this name was registered by other company, later it was changed to JAVA. 
WHY THE NAME IS JAVA?
The team gathered to choose a new name. The suggested words were "dynamic", "revolutionary", "Silk", "jolt", "DNA" etc. They wanted something that reflected the essence of the technology: revolutionary, dynamic, lively, cool, unique, and easy to spell and fun to say.  
    
James Gosling and his team members were consuming a lot of coffee while developing this language. They felt that they were able to develop a better language because of the good quality of coffee they consumed. So the coffee had its own role in developing this language and good quality of coffee was exported to the entire world from a place called 'JAVA ISLAND'. Hence they fixed the name of the place for the language as JAVA. And the symbol for JAVA Language is coffee cup and saucer. 
       
By September of 1994, Naughton and Jonathan Payne started writing WebRunner-a Java based Web browser, which was later renamed as HotJava. By October 1994, HotJava was stable and was demonstrated to Sun executives. HotJava was the first browser, having the capabilities of executing applets, which are programs designed to run dynamically on Internet. This time, Java's potential in the context of the World Wide Web was recognized. 
        
Sun formally announced Java and HotJava at Sun World conference in 1995. Soon after, Netscape Inc. announced that it would incorporate Java support in its browser Netscape Navigator. Later, Microsoft also announced that they would support Java in their Internet Explorer Web browser. JDK 1.0 released in January 23, 1996. The recently released version of java is JAVA_SE8.