Oral History of James Gosling Part 2 of 2

Interviewed by Hansen Hsu and Marc Weber on 2019-04-22 in Mountain View, CA X8971.2019
© Computer History Museum

James Gosling is known as the father of the Java programming language. Growing up and attending college in Calgary, Alberta, Gosling began his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University in 1977, finishing in 1983. While at CMU, Gosling developed the first Unix version of Emacs, learned about byte codes while porting PERQ software to VAX, and developed the Andrew window system. After a brief stint at IBM working on a RISC computer, Gosling joined Sun in 1984, and created the NeWS window system. After NeWS lost to X Windows in the marketplace, a group including Gosling formed the Green project at the end of 1990 to explore consumer technologies, producing the Star7, a multimedia remote control. It was for Star7 that Gosling first created the Oak language, later renamed Java. After a brief spin-out from Sun as the company FirstPerson and an unsuccessful foray into interactive cable TV, Gosling’s team repurposed Java for the Web in 1994, which enabled dynamic and interactive web pages at a time when most were static. Sun partnered with Netscape to include Java with the Navigator browser in 1995. Sun’s goal was for Java to become a network-centric, platform-independent platform that would free computers from proprietary systems like Microsoft. While Java is less popular than other languages on PCs and web browsers, it has become the dominant language in enterprise computing, and a major player in mobile and embedded computing.

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Catalog Number: 102781106
Lot Number: X8971.2019