Hearing Gosling speak last night at Atlantic Station Regal Cinema inspired me to go back and read some of the history of how Java came to be. I think I've read much of this before, but parts of the story are still fascinating.
Here are some interesting excerpts from the last one on the birth of the Green project…
Thus, McNealy was more than ready to listen when a well-regarded 25-year-old programmer with only three years at the company told him he was quitting. Patrick Naughton played on McNealy's ice hockey team. Over beers, Naughton told McNealy that he was quitting to join NeXT Computer Inc., where, he said, “they're doing it right.” McNealy paused for a second then shrewdly asked Naughton a favor. “Before you go, write up what you think Sun is doing wrong. Don't just lay out the problem. Give me a solution. Tell me what you would do if you were God.”
Also this one on the development of their hand held prototype…
The team wanted a working box, small enough to hold, with batteries included. To build one, the members trotted out what they call “hammer technology”; as Naughton describes it, this involved finding “something that has a real cool ‘mumble’ (a neat piece of hardware). Then you hit it with a hammer, take the mumble off, and use it. We got a consumer-grade Sharp minitelevision, hit it with a hammer, and got an active-matrix color LCD. We put a resistive touch screen on the front, making sure there'd be no moving parts on the system, no buttons, no power switches, nothing,” Naughton explains. The team then wanted to add stereo speakers inside, but couldn't find any to fit the case. “We went to Fry's and bought a dozen Game Boys, played like mad for about three hours, then broke them open—that's where the speakers came from.”