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It was a sweltering Indian summer day in New York City in October,
1995. EarthWeb's team of crack Internet programmers had managed
to get tickets to the very first Java Day. We had heard of Java
before, and a few of us had kept up with the white papers and
Usenet groups. We knew something was afoot, but to that day all
that we had heard could be classified as hype without substance.
This would be Sun's chance to prove that Java would live up to
its reputation.
Everybody who was anybody in the East Coast cyberworld sat crammed
together in the standing-room only auditorium. The conference
began with a highly-polished sound and light extravaganza, featuring
a giant fake coffee percolator (no joke!). We witnessed some of
the most famous programmers in the world dancing on the stage
to loud rock music as if it were Letterman. We sat through elaborate
introductory remarks peppered with terms like "object oriented,"
"robust," "platform independent," and "network
aware." We were amused but not convinced: These terms were
so overused already that on their own they didn't mean much.
There was a tangible feeling of electric excitement throughout
the room. Everyone could tell something really new was beginning
and we all were a part of it. Things began to heat up during a
tongue-in-cheek dialogue between Eric Schmidt and Arthur Van Hoff,
where they demoed Java running inside of Netscape for the first
time. Poor Arthur had been up debugging this demo for at least
84 hours and was a bit punchy. We still hadn't seen any code yet,
but we had to admit, this was cool.
Bill Joy stood up and told us about the history of the Java language.
Java began as a small entrepreneurial experiment by a group of
Sun engineers. They had begun with a radical, if somewhat misguided,
project: to design a new operating system for set-top boxes and
consumer electronics devices. The team examined existing languages
to see if they were up to the task and found that none of them
had both the power and simplicity that this goal required. Their
solution: Write a new language. Their approach promised to result
in a language that was as powerful as C++, as object-oriented
as Smalltalk, as easy to learn as Perl, but that avoided the particular
headaches of each, and that worked seamlessly over the Internet.
But what did this language look like? For the developers in the
audience, the crucial turning point was Frank Greco's tutorial,
"Your First Jolt." Finally, we all got to sink our teeth
into the code itself. This was the moment we had been waiting
for. And oddly enough ... it looked like C! We had been expecting
some esoteric new hybrid syntax from another planet. This was
a bit of a letdown for about a second and half, and then we realized
that the very familiarity of Java code would enable it to catch
on like wildfire.
As the day progressed we were shown a number of early demos of
what Java could do on the Web. Miko Matsumura, from HotWired,
showed some of the first animated media applets and blew us all
away. Dimension X showed their cool Vectorman demo and a prototype
of their VR rendering engine-it looked like a gray Pop Tart floating
in space, but it showed promise (later this evolved into Liquid
Reality). We also sat through a very boring talk about connecting
content feeds to some weird server hardware that had essentially
nothing to do with Java but that everyone thought was cool anyway
because we were all so excited. Finally, Danny Hillis delivered
a fascinating speech on the grand scheme of human evolution and
the future of information technology, in which he masterfully
unified it all with Java in the final sentence (what a genius!).
We realized that a new stage of the Internet revolution was about
to start. Dozens of fledgling Java companies were already forming
in the audience as developers began to brainstorm. The Java community
was forming before our eyes. We realized that this new community
would need a central meeting place-a Web site where Java developers
could share information, learn, and keep abreast of the state
of the art.
But we knew, with all due respect, that Sun's Java site just wouldn't
cut it. The Java Team engineers at Sun were busy enough working
on the language itself and would not have time to maintain this
central community site. We also knew that for our own purposes,
we needed access to this kind of information if we were going
to be leaders in developing Java software for the Internet. Like
the original Java Team itself, we saw a need, assessed existing
resources, and chose to create our own solution.
During the lunch break between free Danish, we cornered Kim Polese
and Lew Tucker of Sun and convinced them to endorse the project.
They agreed that a site of this nature would be an invaluable
catalyst for the growth and adoption of the Java paradigm. By
the end of the day we had a mission-now all we needed was a name.
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