Java's history dates back to December 1990 when Sun chartered employees Patrick Naughton, Mike Sheridan, and James Gosling with the task of figuring out the next major trend in computing. Their Green Project's initial conclusion: the convergence of digitally controlled consumer devices and computers would become a significant trend.

To demonstrate that expected trend, Naughton, Sheridan, Gosling, and the rest of their "Green Team" assembled a handheld interactive controller for home-entertainment devices: *7 (Star 7). That wireless networked device (an early Personal Digital Assistant, or PDA) ran a version of the Unix operating system, and featured a touchscreen user interface with an agent software entity - appearing in the form of an animated character named Duke - performing tasks on behalf of the user. The Green Team finished and demonstrated *7 on September 3, 1992.

Star 7 incorporated "a new small, safe, secure, distributed, robust, interpreted, garbage collected, multi-threaded, architecture neutral, high performance, dynamic programming language" to address various issues pertaining to software development for and the execution of programs on a *7 platform. James Gosling created that computer language, and named it Oak (after an Oak tree growing outside his office window).

The Green Project gained momentum, and a potential for *7-type device customers in the cable television industry emerged. The Green Team became known as FirstPerson, and prepared a MovieWood demonstration of their technology for the TV set-top box and video-on-demand sub-industries. Unfortunately for FirstPerson, those sub-industries were still in their infancy, and in the process of establishing viable business models.

Despite FirstPerson's lack of success with cable television, their technology's type of network configuration (envisioned for TV set-top boxes and video-on-demand) was identical to the network configuration of the newly popular Internet. The Internet used the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) to move media content - text, video, images, audio, and so on - across a network of heterogeneous devices. In a similar fashion, Java (a replacement name for Oak, to circumvent legal issues over another computer language named Oak) also moved media content across a network of heterogeneous devices. But Java did something more: it also moved "behavior," in the form of applets. HTML could not do that.

To demonstrate Java's usefulness on the Internet-based Web, FirstPerson

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