When Gosling was at Sun, he was one of two principal architects of the NeWS Window system. The X Window system was designed for "dumb" display devices and so the display elements were all static, not requiring much work from the server. NeWS was designed to run on a (Sun) workstation, where there was a lot of computational power available, so it was based on Postscript. A NeWS client would send a program to the server, not just static commands.
Gosling, unsurprisingly, designed Java with the NeWS model in mind, where web pages were programs, not just static HTML documents. When I got him to sign my copy of "The Java Programming Language", I asked him if Java was the revenge of NeWS. He just smiled.
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