Comment by kybernetikos

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.