Before there was .Net...
Posted by EsoTechTrix@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 16 comments
I have a copy of J++ kicking around somewhere as well that I won at an ACM contest. 🤣 Just pulled this out of my old Sony Vaio laptop box.
Embrace and Extend kids.
ElegantDaemon@reddit
Thought for sure the pic was gonna be Delphi.
cazzipropri@reddit
And that's a lie.
Their JVM was famously NOT Java compliant.
wvenable@reddit
Is something not compliant just because it does more?
billmr606@reddit
I don't remember that, I just remember that I was thrown into a new org under David Treadwell in early 2000 and was technically the first or second .Net framework hire.
fun times.
auximines_minotaur@reddit
What exactly was this madness?
zackwag@reddit
Microsoft originally implemented their own version of the JVM. They got in legal trouble for that and turned it into C# and .NET
jjjacer@reddit
Although back then it actually felt like the built-in Microsoft one was a bit faster and less of a pain to get running than the Sun Java, which is still a very big pain to get running. Giving that compatibility between versions seems to be non-existent sometimes
R-ten-K@reddit
I mean, MS Java was faster on Windows because it really wasn't really 100% Java. In fact I believe MS marketed it as "J++" Another victim of the old MS E3 strategy. Which is why SUN sued them.
In any case, after that lawsuit, J++ and Delphi got drunk one night and had a baby: C#
EsoTechTrix@reddit (OP)
Java was backwards compatible to a fault at the start. Part of what the kerfuffle with IBM and 1.3.
Oracle seems to have lost the narrative. The point of Java was originally to not have to move code like business logic. The VM could move with the platform and your code could stay where it was. Turns out you can't make a lot of cash with that biz model as Sun found out.
I worked for two ex-Sun employees years later. I asked them why Sun never actually went forward with writing anything more than specs and standards for some of the more critical things like, you know, serial and USB. (Save for maybe Solaris) The answer was blunt: "We were too broke.". 🫤
rome_vang@reddit
Spent all their money developing ZFS. /s
R-ten-K@reddit
ZFS was peanuts in terms of the engineering it required.
SPARC was the cost albatross that sunk SUN.
EsoTechTrix@reddit (OP)
They were too busy being the 'dot' in 'Dot Com'. Old school Java is still a stupid powerful system. The ability to stick chunks of signed code into the cloud and pull it down as needed was unparalleled.
At the time I had a system that (ironically) stored modules for a desktop app in Oracle as blobs. There was a rights system that would see if you had access, cache the bits you did, and dynamically bind and run them. I once had a change to the app specced, written, soft deployed, tested, green lit, and then deployed to an entire call center in 2 hours.
Arcane_Xanth@reddit
1999 copyright. Just in time for the new millennium.Â
Vesper6@reddit
I actually worked at a place where their commercial app was written in J++. We converted it to C# later though.
EsoTechTrix@reddit (OP)
By just changing all the calls to uppercase. 😜
zackwag@reddit
I lolled