James Gosling
A Canadian man better known for his work “James Gosling” first created Java in the early 90s. Due to his services, he’s also known as “Dr. Java”. He completed his Bachelor’s degree from Calgary University and earned his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University.
Green Team
In the early 1990s, James Gosling and his colleagues (Mike Sheridan, and Patrik Naughton) at Sun Microsystems started a project to develop Java. For this purpose, they created a team and this development team called themselves the Green Team, and from here the history of Java begin.
First Java Based Application
The green team started a project for interactive television. An example of interactive television would be the real-time voting on the screen in which a user can control the show. However, at that time, this technology was too advanced for the industry but it was ideally suitable for the web/internet.
Green-talk
James Gosling the founder of the Java language initially named it “Green talk” and hence its extension was .gt at that time.
Oak
After some time the James Gosling modified the “Green talk” with a new name “Oak”. He selected the name Oak because it was considered as the symbol of power/strength.
Java
Afterward, in the mid-90s the “Oak” was officially renamed “Java”. The name Java was based on a coffee’s name and hence the official Java community added a coffee cup in Java’s logo.
In 1995-6, the first public implementation was released as Java 1.0. Time magazine declared Java as one of the best products of the mid-90s.
JVM
After a decade a freely accessible software was released by sun microsystem named Java Virtual Machine. In 2006 the J2SE was also modified as the JAVA standard edition.
Java Versions
Until now numerous java versions/java standard editions have been released. Some of them are more stable and have long-term support. While from time to time many versions were released that don’t have long-term support.
The initial versions of Java were JDK alpha, beta, and afterward, some more JDK and J2SE versions were released. In December 2005 Sun Microsoft released the first standard edition of Java i.e. Java SE6.
Long Term Support Versions
The most popular “long term support” releases involve:
- Java SE8, released in March 2014.
- Java SE11, released in September 2018.
- As of today, “Java SE17, released in September 2021” is identified as the long-term support version.
Older Versions
Many older java versions were not maintained for a long time. And they do not have publicly LTS:
- Java SE6, released in December 2006.
- Java SE7, released in July 2011.
- Java SE9, released in September 2017.
- Java SE10, released in March 2018.
- Java SE12, released in March 2019.
- Java SE13, released in September 2019.
- Java SE14, released in March 2020.
- Java SE15, released in September 2020.
- Java SE16, released in March 2021.
Conclusion
The primary motivation for developing java was to create software for electronic devices like TVs, setbox, etc. However, with time, java became one of the top-rated web programming languages. And it starts developing the latest applications, software, mobile app development, etc. This tutorial provides exciting details about the history of java.
