Interesting facts and few important milestones on Java
This year Java celebrated its 25th birthday. Here are few interesting facts on its history.
- In early 90’s Engineer Patrick Naughton of Sun Microsystems started Green Project with James Gosling and Mike Sheridan, aimed to develop new technology for programming next-generation smart appliances.
- Bill Joy, in a paper called Further, proposed to Sun that its engineers should produce an object-oriented environment based on C++.
- Sun Microsystems began work on the Oak programming language as part of the Green Project. A new “Oak” programming language was created by James Gosling, initially for Sun Microsystems’ set-top box project.
- Duke, the Java mascot was designed by Joe Palrang.
- In preparation for its initial public offering, Sun tried to register Oak as the product name, but the name was already taken. A legal review eliminated most of the names, but one was left standing: Java. Sooner the Java programming language got its now-infamous cup and steam logo.
- Java 1.0a2 was announced at the SunWorld conference in 1995, with Sun introduced the slogan “Write Once, Run Anywhere” to describe Java’s unique cross-platform capabilities.
- JDK 1.0 was released in 1996. The first stable version, JDK 1.0.2, is called Java 1.
- NASA’s Spirit rover touched down on Mars on January 4, 2004, bringing Java applications to a new planet.
- Sun released the Java HotSpot virtual machine and compiler as free software under the GNU General Public License on November 13, 2006, with a promise that the rest of the JDK (which includes the Java Runtime Environment) would be placed under the GPL by March 2007.
- Popular video game, Minecraft, was written in Java by Notch.
- Oracle announced its acquisition of Sun in 2010.
- Java completed its 20th year in 2015, with 10 million Java developers, 13 billion Java-enabled devices world wide.
- To accelerate developer innovation, Oracle introduced a six-month release cadence for Java, to start with Java SE 10 in 2018.
- Java completed its 25th year in 2020.
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