Much of this can be credited to a few things: - Sun already had a massive presence as a big-iron enterprise IT company, and machines running Solaris were every

Much of this can be credited to a few things: - Sun already had a massive presence as a big-iron enterprise IT company, and machines running Solaris were everywhere; when such a primary vendor starts pushing a brand new platform, many of their customers follow - The language itself is reasonably well designed, if a little verbose, but very consistent and well documented - The Internet was booming and the prospect of writing write-once-run-anywhere applets for the browser JVM with superior interactivity compared to anything else at the time was very compelling