I was involved using Java right from the very start, in 1995 while it was still available as a beta. I remember being distinctly annoyed that the Java 1.1 brok

I was involved using Java right from the very start, in 1995 while it was still available as a beta. I remember being distinctly annoyed that the Java 1.1 broke the model introduced in Java 1.0, in which a JVM which had no Windows showing or Threads running would terminate automatically. When Java 1.1 was created, the event dispatcher thread was created (incorrectly, in my opinion) as a non-daemon thread, which meant as soon as you loaded the toolkit the JVM would never close until you hit System.exit. Here's the bug I proposed a fix with in November 1998: https://bugs.java.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4030718 https://bugs.java.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4030718 The shutdown hook never got fixed; these days there's convenience methods to add a shutdown hook to the (J)Frame so that on close it would call System.exit for you. I've written a bit more about my history here if you're interested: https://alblue.bandlem.com/2021/01/java-1.0-turns-25.0.html https://alblue.bandlem.com/2021/01/java-1.0-turns-25.0.html