From Online Reporter, a sister publication
James Gosling’s Keynote at JavaOne recently revealed that ‘Duke’ the trademark tumbling
Java icon first made an appearance over five years ago in the experimental *7 (pronounced Star Seven) machines. Java’s lead architect demo’d one of the remaining *7 boxes – a touch-screen PDA’s incorporating a small SPARC-station motherboard and cobbled together to explore the issues behind portable, networked computing. Java, or Oak as it was then called, was simply the language that Gosling and co. designed to build the tools for the project. Existing language tools simply broke, he says. Judged by the brief demo,the *7’s graphical user interface was absolutely knock-out. But having been touted around the cable TV industry for a while, the GUI was shelved and is now gathering dust in the labs. The Java team have other things on their mind.
