The Long Strange Trip to Java (1996)

Here's a video of James Gosling showing the the Star7 PDA: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg8OBYixL0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg8OBYixL0</a><p>It's absolutely mindblowing what they built in one year in 1992(!). It had had a touch screen and inertial scrolling.

As for the rest of his story, Naughton went on to build some of the most successful web properties of the late 90s before having his life derailed by an FBI online sex sting.

I'm no javascript expert so this is probably not the prettiest way of doing this, but:<p>javascript:void(document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].bgColor="#eeeeee");void(document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].text="#333333");<p>Makes the article readable

Hugely exciting to read things like this. It feels like a lot of the early craziness that made things fun is missing from the Valley today. Sun, and the group of people they managed to attract, doesn't get enough credit for the remarkable company they were. RIP.

The sad part about this is how they kicked Bill Joy off the team because he wanted Java to have closures, functions as first class types, etc and nobody else did.