I remember, it was a cool evening in mid 90s, and we were all so excited. No one in my group could shut up talking about it, and how amazing the next day would be, and how everything in the tech would change and the world would never be the same again. It was the biggest thing that happened since the release of Netscape Navigator, and this was going to make up for the feeling of being let then.
Yes, it was the day that Java was unleashed on the world and after starting the download of 5 MB over the whole night, we came in early morning to admire the fish we had caught. When we finally blitzed through the HOWTO docs and managed to write our first Java applet using the sample code and fired it up, the animated jelly beans (was that what it was?) gave us goosebumps for all of 10 seconds, before we decided never to fall for any hype whatsoever, ever.
Years later while doing my first job, when I herd that Java was running on 1 billion devices, I threw up a little in my mouth.
Haha I too was an avid c/c++ programmer in the mid 90s. They even set up this government-sponsored tech ‘hangout’ on the main street of my city where you could learn Java for free on Sun Microsystems machines.
Did the tutorials, built the applet.. thought “this is the gayest programming language I’ve ever had this misfortune to familiarise myself with”.
Still hate it. I hate the fact that they use it at my company.
“this is the gayest programming language I’ve ever had this misfortune to familiarise myself with”
I agree. I think a lot of ideas in the language were great, but overall it really sucked. Something did bother me a lot though, tell me what you think.
The APIs, the documentation and number of classes in even the first release was huge and extensive. It was really hard to believe that a group of people just managed to create it in under 2 years. It would be something that would have been developed as an open open source project in a couple of years with a large number of contributors and many iterations. OR, it must have been developed behind closed doors for a very long time.
I don't recall clearly now, but from what I remember, it was developed internally by SUN and was not an open source project until that first release. This makes me think it was a DARPA tech being released to public, but had been developed long before.
Also, after Java, Sun slowly just disappeared into the sunset - almost like they finished their destined task and were not needed anymore.
I remember, it was a cool evening in mid 90s, and we were all so excited. No one in my group could shut up talking about it, and how amazing the next day would be, and how everything in the tech would change and the world would never be the same again. It was the biggest thing that happened since the release of Netscape Navigator, and this was going to make up for the feeling of being let then.
Yes, it was the day that Java was unleashed on the world and after starting the download of 5 MB over the whole night, we came in early morning to admire the fish we had caught. When we finally blitzed through the HOWTO docs and managed to write our first Java applet using the sample code and fired it up, the animated jelly beans (was that what it was?) gave us goosebumps for all of 10 seconds, before we decided never to fall for any hype whatsoever, ever.
Years later while doing my first job, when I herd that Java was running on 1 billion devices, I threw up a little in my mouth.
I miss Netscape Navigator.
Netscape and AmiPro.
WordPerfect
Memories
Haha I too was an avid c/c++ programmer in the mid 90s. They even set up this government-sponsored tech ‘hangout’ on the main street of my city where you could learn Java for free on Sun Microsystems machines.
Did the tutorials, built the applet.. thought “this is the gayest programming language I’ve ever had this misfortune to familiarise myself with”.
Still hate it. I hate the fact that they use it at my company.
I agree. I think a lot of ideas in the language were great, but overall it really sucked. Something did bother me a lot though, tell me what you think.
The APIs, the documentation and number of classes in even the first release was huge and extensive. It was really hard to believe that a group of people just managed to create it in under 2 years. It would be something that would have been developed as an open open source project in a couple of years with a large number of contributors and many iterations. OR, it must have been developed behind closed doors for a very long time.
I don't recall clearly now, but from what I remember, it was developed internally by SUN and was not an open source project until that first release. This makes me think it was a DARPA tech being released to public, but had been developed long before.
Also, after Java, Sun slowly just disappeared into the sunset - almost like they finished their destined task and were not needed anymore.