A Java History

It all started in 1990, when Sun Microsystems (acquired by Oracle Corporation for $7.4 billion in 2010) engineer Patrick Naughton became increasingly annoyed with the state of Sun’s C++ and C APIs and was given the opportunity to create an alternative language, Java. Currently, Java is used in internet programming, mobile devices, games, e-business solutions, etc.

Many Java versions have been released:
  • JDK Alpha and Beta (1995),
  • JDK 1.0 (01/1996),
  • JDK 1.1 (02/1997),
  • J2SE 1.2 (12/1998),
  • J2SE 1.4 (05/2000),
  • J2SE 1.4 (02/2002),
  • J2SE 5.0 (09/2004),
  • Java SE 6 (12/2006),
  • Java SE 7 (07/2011),
  • Java SE 8 (04/2014),
  • Java SE 9 (09/2017),
  • Java SE 10 (04/2018),
  • Java SE 11 (09/2018),
  • Java SE 12 (04/2019),
  • Java SE 13 (09/2019),
  • Java SE 14 (09/2020),
  • Java SE 15 (09/2020),
  • Java SE 16 (04/2021),
  • Java SE 17 (09/2021),
  • Java SE 18 (03/2022),
  • Java SE 19 (09/2022),
  • Java SE 20 (03/2023),
  • Java SE 21 (09/2023), and
  • Java SE 22 (04/2024).