__/ [ Rex Ballard ] on Saturday 09 September 2006 04:04 \__
>
> John Bailo wrote:
>> Rex Ballard wrote:
>>
>> > Appy came out about the same time as Java
>> > Appy made his first appearance in teh WebRunner Browser, which
>> > appearantly first featured Appy back in 1995.
>> > http://java.sun.com/features/1998/05/birthday.html
>>
>> Have you ever met James Gosling, the so-called "Father of Java"?
>
> I actually, did meet him once at a Java expo, but he wouldn't have
> remembered me.
>
> I have exchanged e-mails with Bill Joy, and did meet Scott and Bill
> when they brought a Sun/1 to Computer Consoles in about 1984. It was
> right after the Mac came out. We loved the machines and the Sun made
> the Mac look pathetic, but at $30,000 per workstation, I wasn't holding
> my breath for the purchase. Some former CCI employees who had moved to
> Kodak (both companies were in Rochester NY, and CCI was a small
> company, Kodak was the "big player"), did come out to see Sun's
> machine, and they really liked it. Kodak bought quite a few of them.
>
> One of my previous supervisors, Sifwat Ali, had taken the lead on
> Kodak's Image Management System (KIMS), and came to see the new
> machine. I was able to spend a few hours/day for almost a month with
> that machine. I got pretty good and showing it off.
>
>> Why is it that I remember java as being something that a group of
>> interns were assigned to work on by Scott McNealey -- not something from
>> the mind of a Sun architect...
>
> According to http://ei.cs.vt.edu/book/chap1/java_hist.html:
> Bill Joy, currently a vice president at Sun Microsystems, is widely
> believed to have been the person to conceive of the idea of a
> programming language that later became Java. In late 1970's, Joy wanted
> to design a language that combined the best features of MESA and C. In
> an attempt to re-write the UNIX operating system in 1980's, Joy decided
> that C++ was inadequate for the job. A better tool was needed to write
> short and effective programs. It was this desire to invent a better
> programming tool that swayed Joy, in 1991, in the direction of Sun's
> "Stealth Project" - as named by Scott McNealy, Sun's president
>
> In January of 1991, Bill Joy, James Gosling, Mike Sheradin, Patrick
> Naughton (formerly the project leader of Sun's OpenWindows user
> environment), and several other individuals met in Aspen, Colorado for
> the first time to discuss the ideas for the Stealth Project. The goal
> of the Stealth Project was to do research in the area of application of
> computers in the consumer electronics market. The vision of the project
> was to develop "smart" consumer electronic devices that could all be
> centrally controlled and programmed from a handheld-remote-control-like
> device. According to Gosling, "the goal was ... to build a system that
> would let us do a large, distributed, heterogeneous network of consumer
> electronic devices all talking to each other." With this goal in mind,
> the stealth group began work.
>
> Jim Gosling was the same Gosling who wrote Gosling Emacs, which was the
> inspiration for the GNU Public License. Gosling Emacs used Stallman's
> public domain code, and featured some coveted printer drivers, which he
> refused to share with Stallman. Stallman was getting a LOT of heat
> from his contributors (including threats of lawsuits and even threats
> against his life), and worked with readers of the net.legal group to
> come up with a way to copyright the EMACs code in such a way that
> everybody's contributions were protected from "poachers" like Jim
> Gosling.
>
> According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_programming_language
> MESA was programming language that was used to program the Xerox Alto,
> and was the foundation for Smalltalk.
>
> Mesa was a Stack based language similar to FORTH. In the mid 1980s,
> there was an attempt to create an object oriented version of FORTH that
> had syntax more like smalltalk, but used simple primitives to build up
> a virtual machine that could be quickly adapted to various embedded
> environments.
>
> In 1976 Niklaus Wirth found the inspiration for Modula-2 during a
> sabbatical at Xerox Parc, where he discovered Mesa.
>
> Keep in mind that Mesa, Modula2, and Forth were all "platform
> independent" and "device independent". A very simple kernel or
> "virtual machine" could be tailored to almost any device, and then the
> application, written in a metacode which used only the tiny kernel,
> using tokens (addresses, or pcode, or jcode), could be run on this
> virtual machine. This made it very easy to put nice friendly
> interfaces on copiers, remote controls, hand-held devices (Fedex
> SuperTracker and other tracking devices were written in FORTH), PDAs,
> and even VCRs and Televisions. Adobe Postscript is a "country cousin"
> of an attempt to write printer commands using forth. The simple forth
> engine could take the forth commands and convert them into the correct
> printer commands for laser printers, dot-matrix printers, or lithograph
> typesetting equipment. The Adobe syntax was more deterministic,
> consumed less space, and was more flexible than the original forth
> implementation.
>
> Perry and Laxen offered FORTH in an OSS (BSD style) version, but warned
> that if anyone tried to get too proprietary or charge too much, they
> would "make you look really rediculous". The gauntlet was being thrown
> at Polyforth, but may have cooled the interest in their version of
> FORTH, which supported files unstead of "blocks', supported vector and
> raster graphics, and even offered an object oriented extention.
>
> Bill Joy was a regular participant in some of these discussions in
> net.lang.* groups, and seemed to have a strong interest in forth,
> smalltalk, and C. Eventually, he chose C++ as his preferred platform
> for Solaris, but Sun also wanted something for "appliances", small
> embedded devices that could run simple code. Bill Joy also wanted
> something that was as simple and flexible as shell scripts, but nearly
> as fast as compiled code. And he wanted it to be object oriented.
>
> PERL was simple and flexible, but at the time (4.0), wasn't object
> oriented.
>
> Gosling doesn't remember me. Probably not, at the time, I was just one
> of probably 100 people he had met that hour at that show.
>
> Sun did offer me a job a few years ago, but I turned them down (I was
> working for IBM at the time). I would have liked working in Boulder,
> but I was a lead architect in a national practice and was working with
> IBM, using OSS and Linux on a number of B2B engagements (along with MQ,
> MQSI, DB2, and WebSphere, of course).
Interesting discussion. Well worth reading, as even the trolls can confirm
(albeit implicitly, by posting derogatory remarks). Keep on writing!
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