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Comment by captaincaveman | Hacker News Reader

JVM was originally designed for set top boxes (STB) I believe, the problem there being a variety of architectures, thus a Virtual Machine solved the problem of write code to the virtual machine and not the physical machine and applications could run on various STB's.

OpenTV provided such a 'middleware' where the main language was C on such a VM, and was (possibly still is) widely used.

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Downvoted, I suspect because people don't believe Java was originally invented for STB aka Interactive TV https://www.javatpoint.com/history-of-java there are other references to this on the web too.

I am possibly conflating JVM with Java, however I was under the impression they was designed as one to begin with.

The language, the compiler, and the JVM were developed at Sun starting in the early 90s at Sun under the leadership of James Gosling.

Gosling started more abstractly based on virtual machines he had built in the past for some pretty bizarre hardware. This was to be general-purpose.

Set top boxes were a very early use case. It coincided with the boom of these types of systems that were growing past the traditional “embedded” boundaries. Gosling and the team were working on that when it was still Oak and hadn’t been branded.

There’s an amazing video of him telling the story. I think it’s on YouTube.

What sort of bizarre hardware? That sounds interesting!

Yeah, the information superhighway was NOT originally the web. Many influential people, like BillG, thought interactive TV and other such innovations would be the “big thing” until Netscape came out and began to completely transform the industry. Then, after a short bit, Netscape began supporting Java Applets and the world was made slightly crappier than it might otherwise have been.

EDIT: I say crappier due to security flaws that were present with JVM and Applets early on

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