The second JavaOne.
I was there and, looking back, it felt like the year Java really stood up.
The video attached to this post is not archive footage. I shot it myself, there, in 1997.
One memory in particular has stayed with me.
At around 8:00 AM Pacific Time, we packed into the hall to watch a remarkable demonstration involving NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory: rover technology being remotely controlled through the emerging Internet and Java environment, anticipating the kind of exploration that would soon take place on Mars.
Remember what the Internet was in 1997.
No cloud.
No smartphones.
No ubiquitous broadband.
And yet we were already looking at software, networks and remote machines as parts of a single distributed system.
Only three months later, on 4 July 1997, Mars Pathfinder landed on Mars, carrying Sojourner – the first wheeled vehicle ever operated on another planet.For me, that JavaOne captured something bigger than a new programming language.
It was one of those moments when you could see that computing was escaping from the computer.Almost thirty years later, with AI agents beginning to act across systems and interact with the physical world, I sometimes think back to that morning at Moscone.
We thought we were watching the future.In many ways, we were. And for those of us who were there – the Java Sunnies, the coffee cups, Duke, and all – one phrase captured the ambition of that moment: “Write once, run anywhere.”
Nearly thirty years later, perhaps we are entering another such moment: Learn once. Act everywhere.
Video shot by me at JavaOne, San Francisco, April 1997.
