An Insider's View of the Early History of Java

We will trace the history of the Java programming language and environment from its early days at Sun Microsystems (about 1991) through to the present, with an emphasis on the "Internet play" period (mid-1994 to late 1995) leading up to the release of JDK 1.0. We will discuss how the team was organized and how it operated during that period, what external nfluences were exerted, and the contributions of the key players. We will conclude with a summary of "lessons learned" from producing a highly successful industrial research project; many of these lessons aren't usually found in textbooks on software engineering.