OPTIMIZING THE JAVA VIRTUAL MACHINE INSTRUCTION SET BY ...

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Addressing this need led to the development of Oak, the language which would
evolve into Java in the coming years. The language would allow for the creation of
a colorful, 3D world with attractive graphics. A handheld device was developed to
run the software, which included a touch sensitive color screen, stereo speakers and
a processor from a Sparc workstation among numerous other features [2].
By the end of the summer of 1992 the green team had a working prototype.
McNealy was ecstatic. The device allowed the user to explore a virtual house in
3D without the need for a keyboard or a mouse. Everything was easy with their
prototype – programming the VCR was as easy as dragging a movie from the virtual
TV guide onto the the virtual VCR.
The prototype device was not the Green team’s only success. In order to get
the device to market, Oak was to become a fully featured, industrial strength object
oriented programming language. The language would operate across networks in
a “very distributed manner”, providing objects that would be able to traverse the
network and execute on any device. Furthermore, Oak would include the security
and authentication components needed to accomplish this goal in a safe manner.
Diagrams of what Oak could do would show it connecting everything from computers
to cars to banks to phones – it was to become the language of all digital devices.
Over the next year things began to fall apart. Discussions were held with several
companies about using Oak to build interfaces for devices such as cell phones and
industrial automation systems. However, deals were never reached. Attempts were
also made to reach a deal to deploy Oak into the interactive TV and set-top video
game machine markets. These attempts to deploy the technology failed as well.
A new business plan was drawn up in early 1994. However it was met with little
enthusiasm from Sun executives, and led to the project being scrapped. Later that
year, Bill Joy and Eric Schmidt wrote another new plan for Oak. Its goal was to
develop the technology for use on the Internet, which was growing rapidly due to
the success of the Mosaic browser released by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina a year
earlier. The plan called for giving away Oak in order to create a franchise. Gosling
worked on improving the Oak code while Naughton developed a “killer app” that
would showcase Oak’s features.
At the end of 1994, a prototype was posted to a secret location on the net. A select
group of individuals were invited to download it. Three months later the prototype
made it to Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen. The technology excited Andreessen
who is quoted in the San Jose Mercury News as saying “What these guys are doing
is undeniably, absolutely new. It’s great stuff.”