James Gosling

NASA Ames Main Auditorium (Building 201),
Moffett Federal Airfield, Mountain View, CA, USA

Reception to follow in
Museum's Visible Storage Exhibit Area (Building 126)

ABSTRACT OF TALK

Once upon a time..."Java, whose original name was Oak, was developed as a part of the Green project at Sun. It was started in December '90 by Patrick Naughton,Mike Sheridan and James Gosling and was chartered to spend time (and money!) trying to figure out what would be the "next wave" of computing and how we might catch it. We quickly came to the conclusion that at least one of the waves was going to be the convergence of digitally controlled consumer devices and computers…” Come and hear the stories behind Java's origin and development, from the perspective of its creator.

BACKGROUND OF SPEAKER

James Gosling received a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Canada in 1977. He received a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1983. The title of his thesis was "The Algebraic Manipulation of Constraints." He is currently a VP & Fellow at Sun Microsystems. He has built satellite data acquisition systems, a multiprocessor version of Unix, several compilers, mail systems and window managers. He has also built a WYSIWYG text editor, a constraint based drawing editor and a text editor called `Emacs' for Unix systems. At Sun his early activity was as lead engineer of the NeWS window system. He did the original design of the Java programming language and implemented its original compiler and virtual machine. He has recently been a contributor to the Real-Time Specification for Java.