Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

Consider that in the mid 90's when it arose, most organisations were writing business code in C++ and paying license fees for things as simple as string handling libraries. There was almost no good solution to cross platform network code. RPC calls required things like manually dealing with byte order.

Then most organisations had deployed windows for staff but needed to run things on Sun servers. Java was a god send as a free and actually cross platform solution that let devs work on windows and run the same thing on the corporate server infra without changes. The culture at the time would not consider deploying scripting language sfor full scale applications acceptable, so Java with it's C++-like structure but built in cross platform capabilities and generous stack of batteries included libraries (for the time) was an absolute god send.