I worked on one, for a large telecom: It was simple business software, which before was written either in Cobol or plain old C. The large performance penalty t

I worked on one, for a large telecom: It was simple business software, which before was written either in Cobol or plain old C. The large performance penalty that Java had back then was far less important than having to mind memory leaks in C, and people already thought Cobol was a language without a big future. It was also at the time before the dominance of x86 on intel hardware, so the compile once, run anywhere idea was also quite attractive to people that knew they wanted to change hardware vendors. It took a few more versions, and a few more JVM performance improvements, before Java was a competitive for a broader spectrum of uses, but it was competitive for business very quickly.