I suspect many today don't fuly appreciate the context of Java in the 1990s and how different the outlook was. A lot of what we take for granted now wasn't even

I suspect many today don't fuly appreciate the context of Java in the 1990s and how different the outlook was. A lot of what we take for granted now wasn't even imagined and even if it was, it wasn't certain. Java was hyuped on three fronts: 1. Desktop applications; 2. Server applications; and 3. Browser applications. We had more platforms then. On the desktop front, Mac was in decline but still existed and was strong in certain niches. On the server front, there were many UNIX variants (eg Solaris, HP/UX, Digital Unix, etc). Cross-platform really was a big deal and much more relevant. We still had desktop apps then. Being able to write a Swing app and run it "everywhere" was a big deal. Otherwise you wre writing things in thing slike Visual Basic (and thus Windows only) or I don't even know what Mac used at the time. On the server, this was the very early days of Web servers. Netscape still existed and sold Web server software. The most common form of HTTP serving was CGI bin. These had a significant start up cost. There were other solutions like ISAPI/NSAPI. Java brought in servlets, which were persistent between requests. That was massive at the time. It creates problems too but it's all tradeoffs. And the last is Web applications. This was the newest area and had the most uncertain future. Java applets were pushed as a big deal and were ultimately displaced by Macromedia (then Adobe) Flash, which itself is now (thankfully) dead and we have Javascript applications. That future was far from certain in the 1990s. I remember seeing demos of Java applets with animations and Microsoft doing the same thing with a movie player of all things. Single page applications simply didn't exist yet. If you wanted that, and honestly nobody did, it was a Java applet or maybe a Flash app. The Web was still much more "document" oriented. Server a page, click something, server a page for that and so on. I still wrote this form of Website in the 2000s and it could be incredibly fast. PHP5+MySQL and a load time sub-30ms. You could barely tell there was a server round trip at all. So Java still exists but almost entirely in the server space. It's probably fallen away from other platforms like PHP, Python, Node.js, etc. But it absolutely changed the direction of tech. Java has left a lasting legacy. I would go as far as saying that Java democratized the Internet. Prior to Java, every solution was commercial and proprietary.