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Comment by Lucretia9 | Hacker News Reader

A lot of Universities and company's were bribed by Sun to start using Java.

Do you have any evidence for this? As an early university adopter, I sure would have liked to know how to get in on that sweet Java bribe money.

In universities there were steep educational discounts of Sun hardware. At the time administering labs full of PCs was a nightmare, and a lot of departments were culturally predisposed towards Unix anyway, so a natural result in many places was Sun workstations or Sun Ray terminals where Java was well supported and was portable enough to also run on the student personal PC.

This is a well known pattern in services now too, lots of platforms are buying user market share by offering free/cheap service for college students and reaping the revenue when the students move on / generate invites.

I wouldn't call this bribes but you can make an argument that it's buying mindshare that you wouldn't get on your own merits.

In 1996-1997 I ran Java 1.0 or 1.1 on Solaris, MacOS 9, and Windows. I developed for, and on, all three. It was available on a number of other Unix implementations, including Linux and DEC. In addition to HotJava, Java applets ran on Netscape. In 1997 Symmantec had a popular free JIT that ran on most everything. These platforms dwarfed Solaris installations. How exactly were these minor Solaris boxes helping sell Java again?

Quite to the contrary. If anything, Java was helping sales of future Sun boxes, rather than the other way around. Sun worked hard to make sure Solaris ran Java efficiently and stably, so if you were a Java developer you might consider Sun boxen professionally.

Our university started to use Java right way in 1996 for compiler design and distributed systems.

Sun didn't need to bride our teachers, doing the same in C and C++ was such a pain with 1996 compilers and POSIX, that they didn't thought twice about changing into an interpreted language.

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