The Java hype was totally unprecedented and probably never repeated. The CEO of a big tech company was on network TV promoting a programming language. I heard stories on NPR in the car. My mother called me to ask me "about this Java thing." Java was everywhere and going to be in everything.

In was accompanied by a huge and successful push into universities to make it the standard didactic programming language. Even MIT switched from Scheme to Java.

That's also why Apple renamed OpenStep to Cocoa. Java was supposed to be the primary development language for Mac OS X (because Java and Cocoa go great together).

Well, having a platform agnostic runtime, you could throw arbitrary code at, was potentially a great deal. It was one of the founding concepts for ARPANET, which never took off, since nobody wanted to run foreign code from the network on their machines. For a platform agnostic runtime, OO may have seemed to fit well, by encapsulating data, handlers and logic into interacting objects. (This is close to the original use case for OO as described by Alan Kay.)

Fun fact: Java was also renamed from formerly Oak.

So if JavaScript was made on this day, today, it would be named AIScript? Got it. Totally hard to understand the level of hype.

> This was also peak Sun, they were really driving the web in this era.

That's not how I remember it. That's how Sun would have liked to see it but it was Apache on Linux or BSD (or even SGI) that was far more prevalent, at least near me. And I spent a good bit of time in the same building as the local Sun dealership. You could not have paid me to use their warmed over and overpriced hardware. And that really is what I associated both SUN and SGI with: companies wasting money.

But hey, we're in a bubble so party like it's 1999. It's fine if your customers are doing the hype thing, but there is no reason to follow them off the cliff. Someone yesterday asked why Bezos doesn't buy one of the big AI players. That's why.