A few choice quotes from The Java Saga, a 1995 Wired article.
This one turned out to be true:
Java is unlikely ever to become a major profit center at Sun, though any increase in Web traffic is bound to increase sales of Sun’s workstations and servers. But in this case, emotion may be at least as important as profit.
As did this one:
“We wanted computers to go away, to instead become an everyday thing,” Naughton said. “We thought the third wave of computing would be driven by consumer electronics. The hardware would come from Circuit City, and the software would come from Tower Records.”
Well, maybe not Tower Records, and maybe not Sun’s Java, but you can pick up an Android phone at Circuit City.
He typed out a list of Sun’s short comings along with his own glowing appraisal of NeXT’s critically acclaimed NeXTstep operating system.
I wonder what happened to NeXT? Oh yeah, it became OS X.
We got a consumer-grade Sharp minitelevision, hit it with a hammer, and got an active-matrix color LCD. We put a resistive touch screen on the front, making sure there’d be no moving parts on the system, no buttons, no power switches, nothing,” Naughton explains. The team then wanted to add stereo speakers inside, but couldn’t find any to fit the case. “We went to Fry’s and bought a dozen Game Boys, played like mad for about three hours, then broke them open – that’s where the speakers came from.”
… The demo was shown to McNealy in August 1992. McNealy saw a hand-held contraption with a small screen and no buttons. … Everything was done without a keyboard, simply by ripping objects with your finger and dropping them with a “ka-ching” sound.
Amazing for 1992. Speaking of, OS X became iOS, and powered the first true consumer electronic to deliver on that promise, nearly two decades later.
The result is that small programs – applets – can fly around the Net without regard to what kind of hardware they end up on. If you need to watch an animation that requires a particular fancy doodad to run it, but you don’t have that doodad, your machine will pick up the Java-coded applet along with the animation file and run both. Who cares where the software lives? Who cares what kind of machine you have? Who cares about Microsoft?
This concept wasn’t far off, but it took Macromedia to pull it off.
Tweaked, renamed, and repositioned, this time the idea has found a willing marketplace; in time, a distributed object-oriented language like Java will probably establish itself as the foundation of the Net. But whether the standard will be Java depends on whether Sun finds a business model to keep it alive.
And then tweaked again to succeed, but in a different role.
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