History of JAVA

The idea of Java was conceived in January 1991 by James

Gosling, Mike Sheridan, Patrick Naughton and several other
individuals who met in Aspen, Colorado to discuss the Stealth
Project (later known as Green Project). The project was started
due to the profound impact of microprocessors in intelligent
consumer-electronic devices such as PDAs, Television setup
boxes, VCRs etc. The goal of this project was to control
microprocessors embedded in consumer-electronic devices. To
serve these goals, a platform independent, reliable and
compact language was needed.
James Gosling who was given the task to identify the proper
programming language for the project ,initially began with C+
+,the language that most programmers were praising
becauseof the object oriented nature. Because of the complex
features of C++ such as memory leaks, multiple inheritance
etc.., Gosling was convinced that C++ was inappropriate for
this project. So he decided to create his own simplified
computer language that would avoid all the problems he had
with C++. Thus resulted in a new language known as Oak
named after an oak tree outside the goslings office window.
The first implementation of Oak was in the PDA type device
known as *7(Star Seven), released in September 1992. It
consisted of the Oak language ,an operating system(Green OS),
a user interface and hardware.
In November 1992, the Green Project collaborators were
incorporated under the name First Person to gear their
technology to meet the demands of growing entertainment
industry. They proposed their technology to Time-Warner as an
operating system for set-up boxes and video on demand
technology. By the end of 1993,it became clear that the
perceived market for the result of Green Project just was not
there. Sun therefore decided to drop the project and disband
the team. In mid 1994, Oak was used to build a new web

browser known as WebRunner which was later renamed to

Hot Java. This illustrated the potential of the language by
allowing animated webpage. During this period, Oak was
renamed to Java as Oak was the name of an already existing
language. The introduction of Java marked a new era in the
history of the web.