[arethuza]

I was working on something slightly similar (embedding a VM into a browser) during '94/'95 and was a bit miffed when I first heard of Java....

However, I did think Java was rather good and when I co-founded a start-up in mid '95 we positioned ourselves as a "Java company" - which was no bad thing in the long term as we were in a reasonable position when Netscape, Novell and IBM later decided they wanted to support it. Indeed our 2 round of VC investment was led by Novell - quite unusual for a UK company at the time...

[sgt101]

I was doing Java in a very mainstream UK company in 1998; but we were leading edge and it became "standard" in 2000ish. By 2003 there were 100's of developers using it where I worked.