by DonHopkins | 2025-10-08 04:38:20+00:00
I've known and worked with James Gosling for years before Java (Live Oak), on his earlier projects, Emacs at UniPress and NeWS at Sun, and fought along side him against Sun management trying to make NeWS free in 1990 (and I left Sun because they broke the promises they made us and spilled a lot of blood), so I didn't need to learn about Java's history from Wikipedia.

James's email that convinced me to go work with him at Sun on NeWS in 1990:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22457490

James' original 1985 paper on SunDew (later called NeWS):

https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm...

David Rosenthal on NeWS -vs- X11 in 2024:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/10/dshr_on_news_vs_x/

James Gosling on how he'd do it over again in 2002:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240126041327/https://hack.org/...

Me on the X-Windows Disaster, comparing X11 and NeWS in the 1994 Unix Haters Handbook:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...

Here's a Stanford talk James Gosling gave about Java that I attended in 1995, where he talks about C++, his original tape copy program that turned into a satellite ground control system, how he holds the world record for writing the largest number of cheesy little extension languages to go, and his implementation of Emacs sold by UniPress (which RMS calls "Evil Software Hoarder Emacs"), and his design and implementation of NeWS (formerly SunDew), a PostScript based network extensible window system.

James Gosling - Sun Microsystems - Bringing Behavior to the Internet - 1995-12-1:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgrNeyuwA8k

>Video of James Gosling's historic talk about Java, "Bringing Behavior to the Internet", presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, December 1, 1995.

In that talk I asked him a couple questions about security and the "optical illusion attack" that he hedged on (44:53, 1:00:35). (The optical illusion attack is when the attacker simply draws a picture of a "secure" pop up dialog from your bank asking for your password.)

He mentioned off hand how a lot of the command and control systems for Operation Desert Storm was written in PostScript. That was his NeWS dialect of PostScript, and was written primarily by Josh Siegel at LANL called "LGATE", who later came to work at Sun in 1990 and rewrote the NeWS PostScript interpreter himself, then went on to write an X11 window manager in PostScript, again proving James's point that people always did a lot more with his cheesy little extension languages than he ever expected (which also held true with Java).

Josh's work on simulating Desert Storm and WWIII with NeWS at LANL:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44540509

Some of Terry Winnograd's other guest speakers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39252103

I also saw Bill Joy's much earlier talk at the 1986 Sun Users Group in Washington DC, where he announced a hypothetical language he wanted to build called "C++++-=", and that he talked about in subsequent presentations.

I think that was the same talk when Bill said "You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN. It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar". More Bill Joy quotes:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/slowlari...

James eventually realized that concept as Java, showing that the kernel inspiration of writing a "fuck you to C++" language existed long before James invented "Live Oak", even soon after C++ was invented. But "Java" was a much better name than "Live Oak" or "C++++-=" fortunately -- thanks to Kim Polese -- though not as succinct and musically inspired as "C#"!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Joy#Joy's_law

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30113944

Bill Joy’s Law: 2^(Year-1984) Million Instructions per Second

https://donhopkins.medium.com/bill-joys-law-2-year-1984-mill...

>The peak computer speed doubles each year and thus is given by a simple function of time. Specifically, S = 2^(Year-1984), in which S is the peak computer speed attained during each year, expressed in MIPS. -Wikipedia, Joy’s law (computing)

>“C++++-= is the new language that is a little more than C++ and a lot less.” -Bill Joy

>In this talk from 1991, Bill Joy predicts a new hypothetical language that he calls “C++++-=”, which adds some things to C++, and takes away some other things.

>“Java is C++ without the guns, knives, and clubs.” -James Gosling