adam bien's blog

An airhacks.fm conversation with James Gosling (@errcraft) about:

"Hello World" with PDP assembly in 1969, exciting places like universities, the University of Calgary (alumni award), dumpster diving to find usable electronics, software does not consume any resources, James loves building things, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Gort is cool, building Gort from tin foil and cans, there were no answers how to build a brain, working for physics department in the age of 14, measuring the interactions between solar winds and the upper atmosphere, ISIS-2 satellite, PDP-8 assembler, CDC 6400, Fortran, PL-1, spending all the free time with computers, teachers were worried, James enjoyed downhill (skiing), Pascal, Multics, Simula, there was no C before 1976, James wrote emacs at graduate school in C, James's emacs became standard on Unix, Bill Joy kept asking James repeatedly to join Sun, James met Andy Bechtolsheim before joining Sun, James joined Sun in 1984, James was involved with User Interfaces at Sun, Sun was missing out on stuff like telephone headsets, VCRs and IoT was already happening, IoT literally launched Java, re-inventing the wheel and repeating the errors in networking, ideas for the JVM, Three Rivers Computer like Xerox Alto was only interested in hardware and wanted to reuse software, writing software for PERQ with UCSD Pascal, porting from PERQ to VAX, James was too lazy to port and started with transcoding, translation worked surprisingly well and outperformed C, Project Green started in early 1991 and ended in September 1992, Java was running at the end of 1991, the implementation of the first Java compiler took a couple of months, the first compiler version was written in Python, the intermediate format was the instruction set itself, Java bytecode follows the polish notation, or execution on a stack machine, OAK was growing outside James's window, OAK was renamed to Java because of legal reasons, James likes coffee ...and tea, Sun was a wonderful place to be, John Gage was cheerleader in chief, Scott (checkout episode #19) didn't like to spend money on marketing, problem with JINIs marketing was lack of marketing, RMI fighted with CORBA (end of first part - to be continued...).