1991

• James Gosling & the Green Team (originally called the “Stealth Team”) at Sun Microsystems start formal work on a project focused on development of a language to support the convergence of computers and consumer entertainment devices.

1992

• The Green Team demonstrates *7, a handheld entertainment device controller, featuring an animated agent, Duke (later the Java mascot). The software is written in a new language, Oak, which compiles to a processor-independent bytecode.

• The Green Team becomes FirstPerson, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Sun Microsystems.

1994

• FirstPerson having been absorbed back into Sun, the Oak development team refocuses its efforts on the Internet, citing the advent of Mosaic (in the previous year) as evidence of a technology convergence similar to that anticipated by *7 and Oak.

• After a last-minute name change, Java 1.0a and the HotJava browser (aka Oak and WebRunner) are demonstrated and become available via download.

1995

• Java 1.0b and HotJava available.

• Netscape licenses Java and announces support for Java in its own browser.

• First Sun/Java developer conference held.

• First 3^rd-party (other than Netscape) licensees.

• Netscape announces JavaScript (aka Mocha, aka LiveScript). The choice of name is based on marketing, rather than any shared development history: Java and JavaScript both adopt the low-level syntax of C, but are otherwise entirely unrelated.

1996

• Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.0

  • Classes & interfaces
  • Hierarchical packages
  • Abstract methods & classes
  • Basic threading API
  • Primitive types w/ wrapper classes
  • Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT)

• Sun demonstrates Java CPU.

• Microsoft releases J++, an implementation of the Java language with Windows-specific language and library features.

1997

• Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.1

  • Inner & anonymous classes
  • Internationalization & Unicode
  • JDBC
  • Read-only reflection
  • JavaBeans
  • Just-in-time (JIT) compiler for Windows (from Symantec)

• Sun sues Microsoft over the latter’s implementation of Java, claiming trademark infringement.

1998

• Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) 1.2

  • Swing GUI framework
  • Collections framework
  • Browser plug-in
  • JIT compiler

• Java Community Process (JCP) launched.