Disclosure: I was working at First Person during this drama.

I had not seen Patrick's take on that fateful budget meeting before and it was interesting to read it. My recollection of the events are somewhat different.

As I recall, the business plan that was pitched suggested that the OS that was being targeted for widespread Java adoption was the Windows release code named "Chicago" (aka Windows 95). There was a widespread belief that Sun was in the process of "ceding" the workstation market to Microsoft as they couldn't afford to put Solaris on x86 without cannibalizing their own hardware business. At the time, Dave Rosenthal (a Sun Distinguished Engineer at the time) had circulated a paper that basically said, "Unless we change dramatically the desktop belongs to Windows NT." At the budget meeting (in February) Wayne put his pitch out there and Scott McNealy hit the roof (he really really disliked Microsoft). He wanted to fire whomever came up with that plan, and Wayne artfully stepped sideways and said it was all Patrick's idea[1].

The end result was that Wayne came back from that meeting, told the team that Sun was shutting down First Person at the end of the 1994 Fiscal year (June 30th, 1995) and that we should reach out to find other jobs within Sun or elsewhere because we wouldn't have our current job come July 1st. James negotiated with Sun Legal to release it "open source" so that when we were out job hunting we could point at something that others could look at to evaluate what we had been doing. They agreed and we did a really low key announcement of that in March just before the World Wide Web conference in Darmdstadt Germany. I had managed to get included in the small number of people going to that conference along with Mark Scott Johnson who was the manager at the time.

The San Jose Mercury news put our "low key" release announcement on the front page of the paper. That resulted in it being picked up by a lot of press outlets who talked to local engineers who gave it glowing reviews. When I showed up at the conference there was a small vendor exhibit area where Sun was going to be showing off the brand new SparcStation 20. The sales guys were in a PANIC because everyone was asking to see "Java" and "HotJava" and they didn't have any collateral to give them or demos. I spent a long night before the exhibits opened helping them download and install Java, and did probably four or five "training" sessions where I gave the sales guys enough to talk about.

Of course with that level of customer "impact" the thoughts of shutting down First Person became a memory and everyone back at HQ was maneuvering to have Java be part of their organization. It was hilarious when Bill Joy came out to congratulate us and tell us that now we knew Java was going to be successful we could put some world class people on it. I don't think he meant it the way it came out, or maybe he did, but either way it didn't have the impact he might have wanted.

Patrick had already left for Starwave at that point so he didn't get to see the shift internally. It was a pretty amazing thing though.

[1] Have I mentioned that the politics at Sun were pretty ruthless?