The Sun Microsystems Inc.’s Java programming language development started in 1990 when James Gosling was designing a new language as a part of a large project to develop advanced software for consumer electronics. During this consumer electronics effort, Sun’s project engineers learned a lot about the value of qualities such as reliability, cost, standards, and simplicity – top priorities in the consumer marketplace. As a matter of fact, most of the consumers in the market demand low-cost, bug-free and relatively simple, easy-to-use products.

The language, originally known as Oak, was small, reliable, and architecture-independent. But the name didn’t survive a trademark search, and was dropped in favor of Java. In 1993, as the Java team continued to work on the design of the new language, World Wide Web appeared on the Internet and took it by storm. The team realized that an architecture-neutral language like Java would be ideal for programming on the Internet, because a program could run on all of the different types of computers connected to the Internet. By the early fall of 1994, Patrick Naughton and fellow Sun engineer Jonathan Payne finished writing WebRunner, a Mosaic-like browser written in the Java language. This early version of HotJava showed off Java in a light, and a demo impressed the decision-makers in Sun. Then came the HotJava browser which was the first Web browser to support Java applets. HotJava demonstrated the power of the Java language in a very visible fashion to programmers and to the rest of the world.

Two factors have contributed a lot to the great success of Java: marketing strategy and timing. Sun has realized the importance of generating broad product interest and acceptance, and therefore freely offers the binaries – and even the source code – of key Java components via the Internet.

Historically, the UCSD p-code system was the best that used a binary-code interpreter to achieve platform-independent portability. But on the machines of the day, the performance penalty was too severe for it to make much headway. Java arrived right on the time when the explosive growth of the Internet fueled the demand for platform-independent applications.

(Marc Abrams. World Wide Web: Beyond the Basics. Prentice Hall, 1998. Extraído de http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~wwwbtb/book/chap1/java_hist.html)

De acordo com o penúltimo parágrafo do texto,