Java, I don't think it was association with the browser. I admittedly was still in school at the time, so maybe I'm missing something, but it always seemed to m

Java, I don't think it was association with the browser. I admittedly was still in school at the time, so maybe I'm missing something, but it always seemed to me that everyone regarded Java applets as more of a cute toy than a serious technology. However, Java did solve one really annoying problem that's hard to properly appreciate if you didn't leave any of your own blood behind in the 1990s: Cross-platform development. There were so many operating systems and architectures back then, and none of them had really risen to prominence as a general-purpose option, so most shops were working with a pretty decent variety of different platforms. At one point I worked at a desk that had three different computers with different processor architectures and operating systems (and therefore basically no software in common) sitting on the same desk, and all three were needed for some purpose or other. Into that environment comes a new language/platform that offers write-once-run-anywhere with decent (if not great) performance, and one of the first standard libraries that might be recognized as reasonably mature by modern standards.