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In the late 1970's Bill Joy
thought about doing a language that would merge the best features of
MESA and C. However other projects (like cofounding Sun) intervened.
In the late 1980's he got Sun's engineers
started on a complete revision of the UNIX operating system
that involved merging SunOS4.x with AT&T's SYSVR4.
In 1989 Joy sold
his Sun stock, invested heavily in Microsoft and moved out of
mainstream Sun to Aspen, Colorado.
By the early 90's Bill was getting tired of huge programs.
He decided that he wanted to be able to write a 10,000 line program that made a difference.
In late 1990 Bill wrote a paper called Further which outlined
his pitch to Sun engineers that they should produce an object environment
based on C++.
Today Joy freely admits that C++ was too complicated and wasn't up to the job.
Around this time
James Gosling (of emacs fame) had been working for
several months on an SGML editor called "Imagination" using C++.
The Oak language (now Java) grew out of Gosling's
frustration with C++ on his "Imagination" project.
Patrick Naughton, then of Sun, now vice-president of technology at StarWave,
started the Green Project on December 5th, 1990.
Naughton defined the project as an effort to "do fewer things better".
That December he
recruited Gosling and Mike Sheridan to help start the project.
Joy showed
them his Further paper, and
work began on graphics and user
interface issues for several months in C.
In April of 1991 the Green Project (Naughton, Gosling and Sheridan)
settled on smart consumer electronics as the delivery platform,
and Gosling started working in earnest on Oak.
Gosling wrote the original
compiler in C; and Naughton, Gosling and Sheridan
wrote the runtime-interpreter, also in C. Oak was running its
first programs in August of 1991. Joy got his first demos of the system that winter, when
Gosling and Naughton went skiing at Joy's place in Aspen.
By the fall of 1992 "*7", a cross between a PDA and a remote
control, was ready This was demoed to
Scott McNealy, Sun's president, in October. He was blown away.
Following that the Green Project was set up as First Person
Inc., a wholly owned Sun subsidiary.
In early 1993 the
Green team heard about a Time-Warner request for proposal
for a settop box operating system. First Person quickly
shifted focus from smart consumer electronics (which was
proving to be more hype than reality) to the set-top box OS
market, and placed a bid with Time-Warner.
Fortuitously, Sun lost the bid. The Time-Warner project went
nowhere, the same place it probably would have gone if Sun
had won the bid. First Person continued work on settop boxes
until early 1994, when it concluded that like smart consumer
electronics settop boxes were more hype than reality.
Without a market to be seen First Person was rolled back
into Sun in 1994. However around this time it was realized
that the requirements for smart consumer electronics and
settop box software (small, platform independent secure
reliable code) were the same requirements for the nascent
web.
For a third time the project was redirected, this time at
the web. A prototype browser called WebRunner was written by
Patrick Naughton in one weekend of inspired hacking. After
additional work by Naughton and Jonathan Payne this browser
became HotJava. The rest, as they say, is history.
Information in this section is primarily based on the first
hand accounts of Bill Joy and Patrick Naughton (which don't
always agree). No doubt other people have still different
memories of what occurred. If you've got any more first hand
information about what went on in the Green project I'd like
to hear from you. |
