It is May 23, 1995, the year in which the web takes off (ten months before Jeff Bezos had quit his job on Wall Street to found Amazon). And Sun Microsystems, a large software and semiconductor company from Santa Clara, Silicon Valley, announces the Java project. Without it, the web and the Internet would have been poorer: interactivity and multimedia were made possible by this programming language. Before, there were only static pages.
The project started in 1991 when a small group of Sun Microsystems programmers decided to explore the new opportunities that were opening up in the world of consumer electronics. The web wasn’t there yet. The leader of this group was James Gosling, they called themselves the Green Team and the first name of the product, intended for connected televisions, was called Green Talk. The starting point was the consideration that those who used the first personal computers, compared to the users of large workstations, wanted products that were inexpensive, without software problems and easy to use. Even the programming language should have been like this, easy to use and neutral for any kind of platform. Things changed and accelerated with the arrival of the world wide web: “We realized that with what we had we could make a great browser”, says Gosling. In the fall it’s ready, it’s called WebRunner and it makes a great impression right away (Netscape will incorporate this technology) At Sun they quickly realized that that object would change the way websites were designed and built. The chosen name is Oak, something solid and lasting, but there is already a software company with that name. It is said that it was Gosling who chose Java – as the Indonesian island – which was preferred last to Silk. Success was immediate. TIME will include Java among the best products of 1995.