The History of Java ☕

1991

The Green Project & "Oak"

At Sun Microsystems, a small team led by James Gosling set out to build software for interactive TV and smart consumer devices. Gosling named the new language Oak — after the tree outside his office window.

// it was never about the web (yet)

1995

Java is born 👋

"Oak" was already trademarked, so the team renamed it Java — after the coffee. Publicly released on May 23, 1995, it shipped with the mascot Duke and a promise that changed everything: compile to bytecode, run on any machine with a JVM.

Write once, run anywhere

1996

JDK 1.0

The first official Java Development Kit arrived in January 1996. Applets brought Java into the browser, and "100% Pure Java" became the rallying cry of a generation of developers.

2004

Java 5 — the language grows up

J2SE 5.0 ("Tiger") was a landmark release: generics, annotations, autoboxing, enums, varargs, and the enhanced for loop. Modern Java really starts here.

for (String s : list)

2006–07

Java goes open source

Sun released Java under the GPL, creating OpenJDK — the open reference implementation that nearly every JDK is built on today.

2010

Oracle acquires Sun

Oracle completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, becoming the new steward of Java. A nervous moment for the community — but the language kept marching forward.

Sun → Oracle

2014

Java 8 — the one everyone remembers

Lambdas. The Streams API. Optional. A new date/time API. Java 8 modernized the language overnight and became the most widely deployed release for years.

list.stream().map(x -> x).collect(...)

2017

Modules & a new rhythm

Java 9 introduced the module system (Project Jigsaw) — and Oracle switched to a predictable six-month release cadence. From here, new Java ships like clockwork.

2018 · 2021

The LTS era — 11 & 17

Long-Term Support releases became the enterprise backbone. Java 11 then Java 17 gave teams stable, modern targets — with records, sealed classes, switch expressions and pattern matching arriving along the way.

2023

Java 21 — virtual threads

Project Loom landed: virtual threads made massively concurrent code simple and cheap. Arguably the biggest shift to the platform since Java 8.

Thread.ofVirtual().start(...)

2025 →

Java 25, 26 and beyond

Java 25 (LTS) landed in 2025 and Java 26 followed in March 2026 — the six-month cadence ticking on like clockwork. Three decades in, Java powers banks, Android's lineage, Minecraft, and a staggering share of the backend world. Still evolving, still everywhere — and still brewing. ☕

// the JVM runs the world