> The C++ era was short lived because Java/C# came along in the latter half of the decade. By this time machines had gotten so vastly powerful that it was possible to implement whole systemes in virtual machines. Just ten years before: that would have been unthinkable.<p>Maybe I've got this wrong, but in the back of my head there's something rattling around about virtual machines being one of the strategies employed for portability in the pre-Cambrian PC explosion, before the IBM PC became overwhelmingly dominant. The first one that comes to mind would be the Infocom Z-Machine; the original source code was compiled down into virtual byte code, and could run on any platform that had implemented a z-machine interpreter.