Java History
Java was first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. It was started in 1991 as a project named "Green Project". The goal was to make intelligent consumer devices that can interact with one another. Bill Joy, James Gosling, Mike Sheradin and Patrick Naughton were the key members of this project.
For this green project, they needed a programming language and C++ was used. Later they found the the features was not sufficient and planned to create a new language. It was named "Oak" based on a Oak tree that was beside James Gosling's office window.
In 1992, Oak was renamed to Java and the name was inspired by the coffee flavor.There were different incidents that followed, by 1994 the first Java compiler was written using Java itself. In May 1995, at a SunWorld conference, Java and HotJava was formally introduced by Sun Microsystems.
In 1996, JDK 1.0 was released and followed by many releases. In 2006, JDK 1.5 was half open sourced. In January, 2010 Oracle buys Sun Microsystems. In March 2014, Java SE 8 was released. It was one of the major releases Java has seen from its launch. Java 8 has lot of new features that has added a new dimension to the Java language.
Java Release History
- May 1995 HotJava launch
- January 1996 JDK 1.0 released.
- February 1997 JDK 1.1 released.
- December 1998 JDK 1.2 code named Playground released.
- May 2000 JDK 1.3 code named Kestrel released.
- February 2002 J2SE 1.4 code named Merlin released.
- September 2004 J2SE 5.0 code named Tiger released.
- December 2006 Java SE 6 code named Mustang released.
- July 2011 Java SE 7 code named Dolphin released.
- March 2014 Java SE 8 released.
