Borland® JBuilder™ Developer’s Guide

From Oak to J2EE—A Brief History of Java

Figure 1.2 shows a brief timeline of the history of Java.

Figure 1.2. A brief timeline of the evolution of the Java language.

Java was born in the early 1990s as Oak, an interpreter written by James Gosling in the C language. From these humble beginnings came the language and the platform that were to become the dominant driving force for the enterprise applications of today.

In the early part of the 1990s, the growth of this new language coincided with the growing popularity of the Internet and the release of the first Web browser, the NCSA Mosaic version 1.0 from the National Center for Supercomputing ...