I started with Applets in 1996, moving from Borland/Turbo C to Java. The Applet UI was never as smooth and rich as the OS-native stuff such as Windows GUI apps. But it was a great developement that brought applications to the web. IE+DHTML with a massive DOM API and VBScript+ASP took over soon, from 1997, to produce HTML-native interactive experience. People wrote ActiveX code to handle button clicks.
Servlets on the server-side survived a bit longer than applets, by evolving into JSP.