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20070824 Friday August 24, 2007

Sun changes its ticker tymbol to JAVA When I first read The Rise of JAVA - The Retirement of SUNW, I didn't think much of it. I believe I read it on some sort of news website, so I didn't realize folks would be so passionate about it. Reading the comments on Jonathan's blog is quite entertaining and smells somewhat of a TSS thread - except there's no back-and-forth banter. Dave provides a good roundup of reactions in Blogs on Sun's new stock ticker.

For me, one of the most interesting things to fall out of this is James Duncan Davidson's Remembering Java Naming Blunders Past.

Back in 1998 or so, there were a bunch of people in Cupertino?working in a building that used to belong to Apple?working to finish up the largest and most complicated release of the JDK to that date: JDK 1.2. Compared to JDK 1.0 and 1.1, it was enormous. It had slipped schedule a few times. And there were lots of changes and new APIs everywhere. So many that it was the first release where it was almost impossible to know how to use every Java API out there.

The powers that be really wanted to commorate this in a big way. They wanted to make a big splash when they officially launched the new version of Java in December of 98 at the Java Business Expo in New York. So, they decided to rename Java. I found out about this, along with all the other engineers working on Java, at an all-hands meeting in Cupertino.

The name was? wait for it? Java2000.

I met James at a MySQL Conference a few years back and he's full of stories like this. If you ever get a chance to hear one of his stories about the early days of Java at Sun - I highly recommend it. Posted in Java at Aug 24 2007, 09:18:15 AM MDT Add a Comment

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Matt Raible is the Lead UI Architect at LinkedIn. The opinions on this site are mine, not my employers.
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