I started on my tic-tac-toe program in clojure today. It took me a hot minute to finally start writing something because I felt a little intimidated on the project and had a little bit of a freeze up of where should I start. Eventually I ended up starting with it evaluating a win and a loss just to start writing something. Once I did that, everything just started flowing. I guess getting myself to write something at all was the first step to making everything come together.

Outside of that, I’ve been tasked on putting together a presentation on Java, so in doing so, I figured it’d be a good opportunity to share what I’ve learned here.

In 1991 (hey that’s the same year my Miata was made) the program that would eventually become known as the Java was started at Sun Microsystems. Their goal was to create a language to program digital devices such as cable boxes and televisions. James Gosling, Mike Seridan, and Patrick Naughton were the key figures in this project. They decided to name the language Oak after an oak tree that stood outside of Gosling’s office. Unfortunately, Oak was not commercially successful in its intended purpose of interactive televisions.

Skip ahead a few years to 1994. The team decided to pivot Oaks focus to the internet. They saw the potential for the program to become able to run on any computer that is connected to the internet. A year later they renamed Oak to its current name Java with their official slogan being “Write Once, Run Anywhere.” This was Javas main advantage over other languages. The language could run on any device that was equipped with a Java Virtual Machine. In 1995 Java 1.0 was released.

In 2007 Java became open source under the GNU General Public License. By 2009 Oracle Corporation acquired Sun Microsystems and with it, Java. This lead to years of legal battles, most notable of them involving Java’s use in the Android operating system for cell phones developed by Google. The lawsuit made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court and lasted nearly a decade. If you’re interested in learning more, feel free to read about the lawsuit in tomorrow’s blog post.