Comment by wolfgke
13 years ago
"I can write a program and have it run without modification on my phone, on an embedded computer running sensors, on a tablet, on my laptop, my desktop computer, my hifi, my network hard drive, a huge server being rented to me on the other side of the world. I can even make it easily distributable so it can run safely on other peoples computers who don't fully trust me. It's unimaginable that any proprietary system from 20 years ago would have been able to produce that state of affairs."
That's what Java was about. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(programming_language) it appeared 1995 - 18 years ago.
As someone who has written j2me applications, I can tell you that you couldn't run them on the desktop except in an emulator, so no, you couldn't take one program and run it across all those systems.
Java failed badly at its dream and ended up adopting an entirely different niche to what was expected.
But you're right, I shouldn't have said 'unimaginable'. I suppose it's just about possible that if java had 'won', we might have ended up with something not massively dissimilar to what I described.