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I think Java was unique as it was the first language with a major corporation behind it and a large marketing campaign.
by FigBug 7y ago
I think Java was unique as it was the first language with a major corporation behind it and a large marketing campaign.
- taffer 7y agoThat was COBOL with Univac, IBM and Honeywell.
- dredmorbius 7y agoSingle platform (OS360 / zSeries/zOS). Java is (famously) multi-platform. As disputed by Sun and Microsoft.
- kgwgk 7y agoWhat about VisualBasic, for example? Or ObjectPascal/Delphi. Or Objective-C.
- dehrmann 7y agoObjective C didn't have a major corporation behind it until 2006-2009. Apple wasn't really relevant (outside the iPod/iTunes) until OS X gained traction and the iPhone (and app store) came out.
- kgwgk 7y agoApple was not a major corporation in 2000? (But it's true that would be post-Java.) Then neither was Sun. (Or maybe FigBug meant IBM which pushed Java heavily a few years later? They also pushed Smalltalk before, by the way.)
- pjmlp 7y agoIn 1994 Apple was about to go insolvent after failing multiple times to create a next generation OS, and spending the remaing money acquiring NeXT, which happened to be a reverse acquisition in the end.
- kgwgk 7y agoWhat do you consider a major corporation? In (fiscal year) 1997 when it merged with Next and started to push objective-c the company had $7bn in revenue (down from $11bn a couple of years before, that’s true) and more than 8000 employees. The next couple of years sales were around $6bn but increased to $8bn in 2000.
- pjmlp 7y agoRight, but had not Steve Jobs "bought" Apple back, and we probably wouldn't be speaking about it anymore. It would have turned into another Commodore, Atari, SGI, DEC,...