Yogz edition

Then Mosaic came out in as an easy-to-use front end to the Web, and that revolutionized people's perceptions. The Internet was being transformed into exactly the network that we had been trying to convince the cable companies they ought to be building. All the stuff we had wanted to do, in generalities, fit perfectly with the way applications were written, delivered, and used on the Internet.

It was just an incredible accident. And it was patently obvious that the Internet and Java were a match made in heaven. So that's what we did. It was Daily, momentum behind the new vision grew. WebRunner was just a demo, but an impressive one: It brought to life, for the first time, animated, moving objects and dynamic executable content inside a Web browser.

That had never been done. WebRunner flyer: click to enlarge. Can I borrow these? Gosling offered to help carry them down to the car, asking along the way, "John, what are you doing with these systems? He had been invited to give a talk at this exclusive "Hollywood-meets-Silicon-Valley" gathering of Internet and entertainment professionals.

He had downloaded WebRunner and was going to demonstrate it to the audience. Gosling, horrified at the prospect of the still-rough WebRunner crashing in a major public demonstration, jumped in Gage's Volvo full of gear and rode along as his "demo dolly. As the talk began, Gosling noticed that many people were only casually paying attention.

After all, what was so exciting about a new language driving a page of text and illustrations in a clone of Mosaic? Then Gosling moved the mouse over an illustration of a 3D molecule in the middle of the text.

The 3D molecule rotated with the mouse movement. Back and forth, up and around. Next, Gosling and Gage pushed the audience over the edge with an animated line-sorting algorithm that Gosling had written. In each of three sets of horizontal lines of random lengths, the demo sorted the collection by size, from shortest to longest, by actually moving them up and down in the browser.

The audience had never seen anything but static images in a browser before this: The lines were moving, as if being sorted by unseen hands! Suddenly, everyone in the room was rethinking the potential of the Internet. Far from the crash-and-burn scenario Gosling had first envisioned, his demo had jolted a very influential audience off their seats, and they were delivering enthusiastic applause.

And within this technology-entertainment crowd, word would spread quickly. They wanted the code to be tested by their friends and a small, informal network of developers. They promoted the release via e-mail, which was cheap and quick.

Going Public By March , there were still only seven or eight binary copies of what they called "1. The team was getting ready to post a "full public" alpha version "1. Lisa Friendly "We released the source code over the Internet in the belief that the developers would decide for themselves," said Lisa Friendly. The team knew that releasing code to developers for free is one of the fastest ways to create widespread adoption. It's also a great way to enlist the help of the development community to inspect code and find any overlooked bugs.

So the team set up an Internet address and, with their hearts pounding, they pushed ENTER, sending the Java source code through the net and out into the world. At first, the team all jumped for joy when someone would download the release. Look, somebody in Australia is downloading now, and we don't even know who it is--that's eight! Soon dozens. Now, word was getting out over the net and feedback was coming back in from developers.

In just a few months, the downloads began to surge into the thousands. The team had to reset their vision of success. Gosling says, "I had to pick a number that represented success for Java. I said, OK, if we reached 10, downloads of this first release -- 10, people kicking the tires -- we would be a total, blow-the-doors-off success. And, along with that milestone, the spiraling volume of email inquiries and continuous downloads was beginning to tax the team's Internet connection.

They constantly needed more bandwidth to satisfy the market's interest. The Java technology team had taken proud note of each day's downloads and crafted comprehensive answers to practically all e-mail questions.

So we decided that each week, one team member would have the job of answering all incoming emails. But by the time each team member had taken a one-week turn at answering e-mails, the task had become a full-time, week-long job for whomever's turn it was. Team member Tim Lindholm was running the Java technology-related mailing lists and was regularly receiving over emails a day.

Gosling set up an interactive system that automatically sent a polite return e-mail for each one received. Finally, the full-time job of support went to team member Jonni Kanerva, a linguist and software developer himself. Then came the e-mails and constant system upgrades -- across each of the technology's multiple platforms, of course. Then came the press, the interviews, the promotional requirements, and the speaking engagements. Then Sun would call and ask if James could go to China the following week.

It's irritating when someone says to back off, take a break, and don't work so hard. Developer complaints about not being able to download the code started coming in frequently. Some even accused the team of purposely withholding the now in-demand code. Soon Sun realized that the Java technology team's popularity was quickly and haphazardly outpacing its own carefully orchestrated popularity, with virtually no marketing budget or plan.

The undeniable proof was in the Web hits. And then it happened. We all wore lots of hats back then. In addition to working on some developer and end-user docs, I was responsible for designing the new Web site, java. Lisa Poulson or Kim Polese had come by my office to tell me that we needed to have something linked with www. Friendly continues: "I thought, no problem. This gives me four days to get it ready. Weekends were just additional workdays back then. In Internet time that was a lifetime.

I had leisurely started to put it together on Wednesday while working on my other projects. Then on Thursday morning at , I went to the driveway to pick up the paper and saw the front page of the Mercury.

There it was. Better get to the office in a hurry. Friendly recalls: "I rushed into the office and worked as fast as I could. But people kept calling and knocking on my door to ask if I knew the story had run with a URL for which there were no Web pages!

I was focused and energized, but at the same time I thought I was going to become physically sick at my keyboard. First Home Page for java. The front-page story clearly positioned the new, soon-to-be-announced Java technology as The Next Big Thing. It even included a quote from Netscape's Marc Andreessen, giving the nod to Java technology as "great stuff. It brought an immediate swarm of calls and inquiries from the press. The rest of the world, the non-programmers, were suddenly taking notice, and almost overnight, the Java technology team was sitting at the table with the grown-ups.

Sorry to Steal the Show, Dad Imagine the scene: The public announcement of Java technology has been scheduled as a part of the keynote speech at the SunWorld show kick-off. The announcement would have a brief, but exclusive, place in the Sun spotlight. But then an unexpected turn of events occurs. It is about 4 a. Sun's Eric Schmidt and George Paolini are shaking hands with Netscape's Marc Andreessen on an agreement to integrate Java technology into the omnipresent, omnipotent Navigator browser.

It had been a long session of tough words and big numbers, but in the end, Andreessen agreed to step out on stage during the morning's keynote speech and reveal the surprise agreement as part of the Java technology announcement.

Most of the Java team didn't know the agreement has taken place until the moment Andreessen and the Sun execs walk on stage. The air was electric throughout the room. The prospect of Navigator being able to open these new, mysterious, and simple Java technology-based applets on any Web page from any platform was unbelievable news to this audience. Andreessen was on stage for less than three minutes, and once again, an influential audience of technologists and the press is pounding out excited applause, knowing they are witnessing the beginnings of something very big for the future of the Internet.

Epilogue A lot of synergistic things have happened in Internet and enterprise technology in the last few years, and these are just the beginning: JDK, the sandbox, applets, thousands of Java technology-oriented startups, over a thousand books on Java technology, JavaBeans architecture, Java Studio, Netscape Communicator, thousands of Internet service providers, 60 million Internet users, 56K and cable modems, electronic commerce, servlets, Java Foundation Classes, Enterprise JavaBeansTM components, JavaOS for BusinessTM, and commitments from major players such as IBM.

More than merely a series of software products and events, the list above is an indication of how fast this technology has grown in the last several years. Java technology is a major computing environment now, a river that has flooded its banks and is now coursing just about everywhere across industries and the enterprise.

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