Java was a three-day hotfix away from dying horribly on stage

If there is a driving theme to The Java Story documentary, which debuted Friday on YouTube, it would be that even some of the most important and popular technologies come from humble beginnings. In this case, we're talking about a language that started life as a failed attempt at set-top box dominance and required a massive rewrite just days before its big conference debut. Today, Java consistently hovers near the top of the TIOBE programming language popularity index and remains widely used for large enterprise applications. But at one point in 1994, Sun Microsystems was just about to abandon the effort. Tim Lindholm, who was hired to polish up a virtual machine runtime for what would become Java, told The Register, “I was one of the...

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