Programming Windows: Java (Premium)

In early 1991, engineers at Sun Microsystems created a small team to discover whether there were any opportunities for the firm in consumer electronics. At that time—Windows 3.0 had been out for barely a year, and audio CDs were still considered advanced technology—Sun was known only for its expensive and high-powered Unix workstations, so this foray into such a different market may have seemed unusual.

But Sun’s initial research had uncovered a potential market that was not that dissimilar to the TCP/IP-based networks that Sun had pioneered for its workstations: Time Warner and other cable giants of the day would need interactive and interconnected set-top boxes for TVs. These boxes would run on a diverse set of hardware, and Sun figured it could create a platform that would virtualize the hardware and work anywhere.

The project was codenamed “Green” and was led by Sun engineers James Gosling, Patrick Naughton, and Mike Sheridan. The platform they were creating had to be low-cost, bug-free, and simple to meet the needs of the market. And they initially started with the C++ programming language. But C++ proved to be too inefficient for the simple platform that the team imagined. And so Gosling created his own language with a simplified syntax based on C and C++.

He called it Oak. Because there was an oak tree outside of his window.

But Oak and the software platform that the team created was “too far ahead of its time,” Gosling later recalled, noting that the cable companies feared losing control of a system in which users could “read and write information into the system.” By the time Sun realized that it couldn’t market the technology to cable companies, it was 1993. So Gosling and his team started shopping Oak around Sun, trying to figure out something to do with it.

“Why not the Internet?”

The question is remembered as a “joint epiphany” but it was most likely Sun co-founder Bill Joy who saw the potential of this new system. The Internet provided exactly the kind of network that Oak required, and because any kind of machine could connect to this network, its hardware abstracting runtime environment was likewise ideal.

“The Internet was being transformed into exactly the network that we had been trying to convince the cable companies they ought to be building,” Gosling recalled. “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 [Oak] were a match made in heaven. So that’s what we did.”

Sun’s first efforts to bring Oak to the Internet resulted in a web browser, modeled after Mosaic, called WebRunner (and later renamed HotJava). It was the first browser to add animated, moving objects to the web, and to dynamically display content. Previous efforts were just text, and images opened in separate windows.

By March 1995, Sun was ready to go public with Oak. But a quick trademark search revealed that they could not use that name. And so Gosling came up with Java because of its connotations of “caffeinating” or “jolting” the web. Sun, meanwhile, looked to see which Internet stakeholders might want to license Java. And Microsoft was not on its list.

Indeed, the two had a rather strained relationship by that point.

Sun’s interactions with Microsoft were virtually non-existent at first, but they escalated over the years. In the late 1980s, the two firms had almost signed a licensing deal by which Presentation Manager, the GUI from OS/2, would have become the standard user interface for Unix. Sun co-founder Scott McNealy later said that the deal fell apart because Microsoft was asking a $60 royalty per machine, whereas he thought even $6 would have been “outrageous.” As for Microsoft’s part, Nathan Myhrvold had described the deal as “very reasonable financially” to both companies.

But Microsoft’s sudden success in the early 1990s rankled Sun executives. Its arrogance didn’t help either: When Microsoft announced and then shipped NT, which it had described as a “Unix killer,” those executives were right to sit up and take notice. Microsoft was “cruising for a bruising,” in the words of Bill Joy. He felt that Microsoft’s software was too complex and too unreliable and that it was successful only because of its aggressive business practices.

In 1992, Sun CTO Eric Schmidt attended an industry event at which Bill Gates openly admitted that Microsoft’s applications division colluded with its Windows teams, refuting the public statements he and other Microsoft executives had made that there was a so-called “Chinese wall” preventing the need for an antitrust inquiry. Schmidt took notes.

“He denied there being a Chinese wall at Microsoft,” Schmidt’s notes read. “He clearly stated that the software groups all throughout Microsoft Corporation talked to all others. He claimed that the use of hidden APIs was an error by the team.”

Indeed, Microsoft’s use of secret APIs that were unavailable to third-party developers was a focus of early antitrust investigations against the software giant. And Sun had been among those Microsoft competitors speaking to antitrust investigators from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). “Microsoft went beyond the bounds of proper behavior,” Schmidt said of those talks.

As Microsoft’s antitrust troubles grew throughout the 1990s, Sun was among the firms—with Borland, Lotus, and others—pressuring the government to rein in the company. And when Microsoft signed a consent decree with the FTC in 1994 that supposedly ended its discriminatory and illegal licensing practices, Sun, with Apple and Sybase, formally opposed the settlement as too lenient.

By the time Microsoft belatedly figured out that the Internet was important—the subject of a future article in this series—Sun had already recast Java as a programming language and cross-platform runtime environment for websites and the web browsers that would connect them to users. Three months ahead of the Windows 95 launch, Sun launched Java at its Sun World conference in San Francisco. And on stage next to Mr. McNealy was a newcomer, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, a key figure in the development of the Mosaic and Navigator web browsers. His new company was adopting Java.

As with the Internet, Microsoft didn’t initially understand the Java threat; it was just a programming language, after all. “The reaction to Java [at Microsoft] was lukewarm,” Microsoft’s James Allard—a key figure in convincing Bill Gates to embrace the Internet—said of the firm’s first impressions.

“Why is Business Week writing about Java?” Gates caustically asked the publication in late 1995. “Just having another computer language doesn’t change the dynamics of [anything].” Gates promoted Visual Basic and the Blackbird publishing tool it was creating for its Marvel (MSN, the Microsoft Network) online service as being more relevant. Besides, Blackbird was being reworked for the World Wide Web, he said.

But Java was more than just another programming language: It was also an operating environment that virtualized and thus negated the underlying hardware and operating system. If Java caught on, it could end the dominance of Windows and Microsoft’s rule over personal computing. And Sun was even working on a Java-based operating system at its Smallworks research lab in Aspen, Colorado.

Gates may have been crapping on Java publicly, but he had privately told his staff to reach out to Sun and license the technology. In November 1995, Myhrvold and Schmidt met secretly for the first time to discuss Java. Then, after a series of back-and-forths between various executives from both companies, the details were hammered out. Late on Wednesday, December 6, each side finally signed off on the deal.

“This is a huge deal for Sun, a huge deal for Java, a huge deal for the industry,” Schmidt by phone told Sun CEO Scott McNealy, who was in New York City. “We did it.”

They may have done it, but Schmidt, McNealy, and the rest of Sun didn’t understand what they had done. Microsoft needed to get the Java licensing deal signed ahead of what would be an epic December 7 announcement at which it would show the world that it was embracing the Internet. And Microsoft had no intention of just licensing and using Java. Instead, the software giant planned to embrace and extend Java and seize control of both Java and the Internet itself in the process.

Unbeknownst to Sun, Microsoft had just declared war.