> the Smalltalk business pivoted into Java

Interestingly OTI (which was purchased by IBM in 1996 and did all the Smalltalk/Visual Age and later Eclipse) had a VM that could run both Smalltalk and Java bytecode:

in order to accomodate Java execution, OTI developed what was called the UVM (or Universal Virtual Machine) whcih could execute both Smalltalk and Java byte-codes, and used Smalltalk to implement the Java primitive functions which were implemented in C in the Sun JVM.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090611013334/http://talklikead...