History of Java

James Arthur Gosling, Mike Sheridan, and Patrick Naughton started the Java language project under Sun Microsystems of USA in June 1991. This team was known as Green team.
It is interesting to note that Java was not developed keeping in mind the World Wide Web.Originally, Java started as a project(codenamed Green) to allow different digital electronic devices such as Set-Top box, controllers to use a common language.It was originally named Oak after an Oak tree which was outside Mr. Gosling's office.The team which included Patrick Naughton pointed out that the existing languages like C and C++ had limitations in terms of reliability and portability.They modeled C and C++ to make Java but removed multiple features that created ambiguity and problems and thus made java a simple, reliable, portable, yet powerful language
The First version of JDK was released on January 23, 1996.

Principles

There were five main philosophy in the creation of Java
➤It should be simple, Object Oriented and have familiar syntax
➤It must be secure and robust.
➤It must be architecture neutral and portable.
➤It must have high performance
➤It must be threaded and dynamic.

Versions of Java

• JDK 1.0 (January 23, 1996)
• JDK 1.1 (February 19, 1997)
• J2SE 1.2 (December 8, 1998)
• J2SE 1.3 (May 8, 2000)
• J2SE 1.4 (February 6, 2002)
• J2SE 5.0 (September 30, 2004)
• Java SE 6 (December 11, 2006)
• Java SE 7 (July 28, 2011)
• Java SE 8 (March 18, 2014)