Java nearly crashed before its 1995 debut

A new documentary, The Java Story, debuted on YouTube on Friday with a reminder that one of enterprise computing’s biggest languages came close to failing more than once. According to Tim Lindholm, Sun Microsystems was close to abandoning the project in 1994, and Java’s public debut in 1995 was nearly derailed by a runtime bug that could have made it “die horribly” on stage.

The film is the latest language documentary from the team behind earlier features on C++, Python, and React. Those projects were originally funded by tech job site Honeypot.io, which was acquired by XING in 2019. Founder Emma Tracey later bought the production operation back from New Work SE and relaunched it as Cult.Repo. The Java Story is the new company’s first release, featuring James Gosling, Mark Reinhold, and Brian Goetz.

Java began as Oak, a language and runtime built inside Sun’s experimental FirstPerson unit for interactive TV set-top boxes. The effort was tied to a Time Warner bid that Sun lost to Silicon Graphics (SGI). Sun then laid off most of the team, keeping just 12 engineers, including Gosling and project manager Kim Polese.

Lindholm, who had joined only a month earlier, told The Register the remaining group felt like “refugees in a bombed-out bunker.” The project’s next move came when one engineer started experimenting with the Mosaic browser and suggested targeting the early web instead. The team built a Mosaic clone called WebRunner, a precursor to Java applets, and renamed Oak to Java in early 1995.

The real danger came just before SunWorld 1995, the conference that preceded JavaOne. Lindholm said he and Frank Yellin were responsible for turning Gosling’s prototype into a commercial-grade runtime, including difficult features like threading and garbage collection. Days before the event, Lindholm discovered the threading model was “fundamentally broken.” On SPARC, interrupts could fire while an instruction was executing, leaving the system unable to recover flushed state from memory.

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His fix was drastic: three days before the conference, he rewrote the entire threads package. When then-Sun CEO Scott McNealy demonstrated Java on stage, Lindholm sat in the audience expecting the worst. The rewrite held.

The documentary also revisits Java’s unusually early source-sharing model. Sun distributed the binary runtime freely and provided source code to anyone who asked; thousands did. Lindholm said the arrangement let outsiders fix bugs and port the software, though Sun would not formally open source Java for another decade.

It also covers Java’s clash with Microsoft, which licensed Java for Windows in 1996 but added APIs and omitted others, prompting Sun to claim Microsoft was undermining Java’s cross-platform promise. The legal fight dragged on for years and ended with Microsoft paying Sun nearly $2 billion through a series of settlements.

The film follows Java through J2EE, Java EE 5, Spring, Sun’s decline, Oracle’s acquisition, and the spread of JVM languages after OpenJDK. Lindholm, who later spent 20 years at Google before retiring earlier this year, summed up his role in Java’s rise simply: “it was kind of a random thing. You can never tell what parts of your life will end up being really significant for whatever reason.”