alt Hacker NewsYou mean, in 01999? I'd have to see that, because my recollection of that time is that JIT was generally considered unproven (and Java slow). That was 9 years before Chrome shipped the first JavaScript JIT, for example. The only existing commercial products using JIT were Smalltalk implementations like VisualAge, which were also slow. Even HP's "Dynamo" research prototype paper wasn't published until 02000.
Or do you not count Merced as "shipping"?
Wikipedia tells me that Merced shipped in May 2001, which matches my recollection of not actually seeing a manufacturer’s sample until about then. That box was the largest computer I had ever seen and had so many fans it sounded like an engine. It was also significantly slower than the cheap x86 clones we had on own desks at running general purpose software.
JIT compilation was available before but became the default in Java1.3, released a year earlier to incredible hype.
Source: I was there, man.