The Long Strange Trip to Java

The Long Strange Trip to Java

Note: This is an unabridged, unedited version of the Epilogue of my book, The Java Handbook. My editors fought with three problems, libel, slander and page count. We were out of space, and they were also worried a few of my associates from the last 12 years might want to sue them for things I've recalled about them. Well, I kinda see their point... but then everything I say in here is merely my opinion, and this web publication in no way should reflect the views of Osborne/McGraw-Hill, nor any of their personnel. And if I've insulted anyone in this page to the point that they feel like calling a lawyer, I'll snip them out of it as soon as they contact me. (I should also say that the contents of this page have nothing to do with Starwave Corporation while I'm here). 'nuff said.

I've debated with myself for several years about whether or not to write this down. After so much time has passed, the facts are confused, 20/20 hindsight creeps in, and selective memory plays a role in how fairly I can portray the events. Many reporters have asked me my version of these past few years, several have come close to capturing the essence of it all. But still, I feel the need to one last time, take a walk through the past to help you all understand how we came to be where we are today. To requote George Santayana from chapter 2, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."<br>All appropriate disclaimers apply, no warrantees are expressed or implied. The reader assumes all responsibility for opinions formed from this chapter.

I first met James Gosling in the spring of 1988. He was wearing an ill-fitting white T-shirt with an obscure reference to Jean Paul Sartre's cat. He wasn't wearing shoes, and his socks didn't quite match. His large corner office in building 14 of Sun's Mountain View campus was crowded with piles of books and papers strewn about. His Sun 3/60 had a "Macintosh Test Drive" bumper sticker on the side of the monitor. He had nice art on his walls. Not the typical hacker dinosaurs and free posters from Usenix conferences, but real Japanese pen and ink prints. His bookshelf was full of the classics of computer science. Horowitz, Knuth, Foley and Van Dam, Xerox bluebooks, SIGGRAPH and OOPSLA proceedings, the collected works of Breathed and Larson. Clearly, James was not your garden variety programmer. In retrospect, I should have been in awe, lying prostrate doing my best Wayne Campell, "I'm not worthy" impression. Fortunately for me, I was too clueless to know who James Arthur Gosling was.<br>A few months earlier, I had seen for the first time a few Sun 3/50's at my tiny engineering university on the fringe of the frozen tundra known as the Adirondack State Park in Northern New York State. A place not too far away, Lake Placid, had been made famous by a bunch of college kids beating a bunch of future NHL Russian hockey players. My school, Clarkson University, was almost as famous for attracting a collection of those mostly Canadian boys to come play NCAA Division I hockey. Over the years, while Clarkson continued to turn out a few NHL prospects like LA Kings captain Dave Taylor, they rarely sent many software engineers to Silicon Valley. This was left to such East Coast titans of computer science as Carnegie Mellon University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Clarkson could kick some butt in hockey, but CMU and MIT owned them when it came to CS. It may sound odd then, to consider that in 1983 when CMU hadn't even gotten their first Macintosh yet, and MIT hadn't started wasting time with the IBM RT, tiny little Clarkson (College of Technology still that year) managed to put a PC into every incoming freshman's hands. We showed up at school that day in August and got in a big long line and signed for a bunch of big boxes, and went back to our dorms to unload a blazingly fast 4.77mhz 8086 from Zenith Data Systems.<br>This box was cool. It had dual processors, an 8086, and an 8085. It came with two operating systems, MS-DOS, from a little company in Washington State of all places with an ugly green logo called Microsoft, and CP/M from Digital Research. It had a really cool display subsystem which could show 8 colors at 640x480 resolution. Now Clarkson and Zenith didn't seem to think that it was much of a problem that this system wasn't compatible with IBM's standard. After all, how many of those PC's were out there? Well... I noticed. I spent the previous summer working on an authentic big blue IBM 5150 PC, and none of my software would work properly on the Z-100. I learned first hand the problem that would plague me for the rest of my career. Microsoft had created a version of its own software, MS-DOS, which was incompatible with the mainstream version, PC-DOS. Display hardware differences between the Zenith and the IBM "CGA" were exposed by the operating system, thus causing all of the software to be incompatible.<br>So, what did...