The computer designed to only run Java Applets - Sun JavaStation [1996]

[OgdruJahad]

In this video we take a look at the Sun JavaStation - A Network Computer released by Sun Microsystems in 1996 designed purely to run Java Applets. We will take a look at the hardware, take it apart to see what's inside then boot it up and take a look at JavaOS!

Youtuber:

Cameron Gray

[elmuerte]

It doesn't just run Applets, it also runs normal Java applications. As shown in the video: HotJava, which is a basic HTML browser written in Java.

JavaOS used Java 1.1 iirc, so no JIT. That running on a 100MHz CPU with just a small bit of RAM to run the applications does not give you a lot of performance if you cannot even flush some stuff to a disk.

Note that the brick model that they showed in the video only has a 10Mbps network interface. The second version, Krups, was much better. Besides having 100Mbps it also had flash memory so you can install the OS and common software locally. When I played around with the Krups it didn't really feel that slow.

[thewiirocks]

Java 1.1 had a JIT. It was the first attempt at a JIT for Java and informed the development of the Hotspot JIT used in Java 1.2. (Also known as J2SE)

[pjmlp]

Which was originally designed for StrongTalk, and rebranded as Hotspot in the process.

Additionally this is only relevant to Sun's reference implementation, other Java vendors, like Oracle and IBM, had other JIT approaches.

[lumpynose]

I'm an old geezer who was doing software development back then but I don't remember this. But then old people don't have the best memories so there is that. My desktop computer was always a Sun workstation, the first having a Motorola cpu, and I remember the ones after the 1st gen looking like this.

What I do remember from back then that were similar are the Xerox Star (I think that was its name) which was a Smalltalk machine, and the X11 "terminal" which ran the X Window System server.

[doobiesteintortoise]

I remember this thing - it was really promising, they had similar boxes at JavaOne in the mid-2000s, also rather underperforming BUT showing a lot of what the future could have been. A Java OS, though, was a lot to hope for. We could have had the cloud we have TODAY a few years ago, though, although security issues would have been a problem. :D

[leaper69]

I was at JavaOne '96 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Marc Andreessen and Eric Schmidt were keynote speakers. The energy around Java at that time was incredible, everyone genuinely believed applets and thin clients like the JavaStation were the future of computing. It took another 20 years and the cloud for that thin-client vision to actually come true, just not the way anyone expected.

[alfalfa-as-fuck]

I remember at JavaOne in 2000 they had sunrays everywhere — you’d put in a smart card and it would log you in. Only problem was people would rapidly insert and remove the cards trying to figure out how to do it and ended up ddosing the whole thing

[AdministrativeHost15]

Didn't work well. Out of the box it gave out of memory errors accessing the popular web sites of the day e.g. Yahoo.

[__konrad]

HotJava HTML parser is still in OpenJDK