only an anecodote for me but I was on a team in 1997 or so where we exactly were brought in to a financial client to write for them a "thin client" in Java, exp

only an anecodote for me but I was on a team in 1997 or so where we exactly were brought in to a financial client to write for them a "thin client" in Java, explicitly using the fact that Java was so strongly hyped that it would allow the team that was hiring us to poke a hole in their existing VB codebase and break up some of the calcification in their technology organization. In the early meetings we were pitted directly against a tech manager there who was very strongly advocating for Smalltalk; we as an outside vendor were allowed to win that argument that Java / "thin client" etc. were all the way, literally verbatim to the article's paragraph: > The World Wide Web diverted enterprise attention away from fat clients and suddenly web thin clients were the hot new technology. At the same time Sun Microsystems’ massive marketing campaign for Java convinced enterprises that Java was the future for both web and standalone client applications. my anecodote continued to match what this article says: > Even though Java never delivered on its client-side promises you can say that again, within one dev cycle the original idea of delivering a web-based servlet was gone, as there was no support for any local machine / file / upload / etc access, we then delivered a fat java client where I ended up having to write basically all of Swing UX which hadn't quite been invented yet as the native checkboxes/ textareas / etc all performed like crap on the little 486/pentium machines we were deploying towards.