007. History of java.

Perhaps the microprocessor revolution's most important contribution to date is that it made possible the development of personal computers which may soon number 300 million worldwide. Personal computers have had a profound impact on people and the way organizations conduct and manage their buisness.

Many people believe that the next major area in which microprocessors will have a profound impact is in intelligent consumar eloctronic devices. Recognizing this, sun microsystems funded an internal corporate research project code-named green in 1991. the project resulted in the development of a C and C++ based language which its creator, james gosling, called Oak after an oak tree outside his window at sun. It was later discovered that there already was a computer language called Oak. When a group of sun people visited a local coffee place, the name java was suggested and it stuck.

But the green project ran into some difficulties. The marketplace for intelligent consumar electronic devices was not developing as quickly as sun had anticipated. Worse yet, a major contract for which sun competed was awarded to another company.. So the project was in danger of being cancled. By sheer good fortune, the world wide web exploded in popularity in 1993 and sun people saw the immediate potential of using java to create web pages with so- called dynamic content.

 This breathed new life into the project.

 sun formally announced java at a major conference in may 1995. Ordinarily, an event like this would not have generated much attention. However, java generated immediate interest in the buisness community because of the phenomenal interest in the world wide web. Java is now used to create web pages with dynamic and interactive content, to develop large- scale enterprise applications, to enhance the functionality of world wide web servers[ the computers that provide the content we see in our web browsers], to provide applications for consumar devices[ such as cell phones, pagers and personal ditital assistants], and so on.