[skybrian]

Yes, applets looked promising, but server-side, you might say Java was the Node.js of its time. Back in the early dot-com era, we were looking for a way for inexperienced programmers (us) to do Internet programming easily, and with its built-in threads and easy-to-use network libraries, Java looked pretty good. (And where it wasn't good yet, we thought Sun would improve it.)

This is around the time when Apache was popular with its original process-based concurrency model. You could waste a lot of memory running mod_perl with a pool of a hundred processes.

Java performance was pretty bad compared to C, but writing a select-based C server looked convoluted, and using threads in C looked obscure, non-portable, and bug-prone. We wanted a friendlier language than that.