Programming Tutorials

History of Java

By: Emiley J. Printer Friendly Format    

It is always a good practice to know a little bit of history and background of any technology before starting to actually use it. In fact Java has nothing to do with the 'Island Java' in Indonesia. It all started at Sun Microsystems when they were developing an application for the 'set-top box'. 

In 1990's they tried to develop a portable application that can run on any micro chip. Not surprisingly, the team chose C++ to accomplish this task. But soon they found that there are many features in C++ that prevented it from being PORTABLE. Therefore they tried to remove those features that are platform dependent. In doing so, they ended up developing a new programming language. They named this new programming language as OAK. Some say that the reason simply being that the team leader James Gosling spent most of the time under a OAK tree. So they chose this name. Surprisingly, this programming language never took off.

In 1995, the WWW (World Wide Web) became popular and Internet came to be widely used even among homes. This was a blessing in disguise for 'OAK'. The WWW presented  the same problems and issues such as the 'set-top box' software. Around the globe, there were many different platforms, under different operating systems and therefore there was a need for a portable, platform independent programming language which can be used to write programs that can run on all these different platforms without the necessary of re-compilation.

Sun Microsystems, renamed OAK to 'JAVA' with some changes and launched it in the same year. Developers around the globe immediately found Java's potential and the WWW got its new look and Java took the world by storm.