Which company originally developed Java?

Sun Microsystems originally developed Java. The language was created by a team at Sun led by engineer James Gosling, with Patrick Naughton and Mike Sheridan among the early members of the project.

Work began in 1991 as part of Sun’s Green Project, which explored software for interactive television and other consumer devices. The language was first called Oak, named after a tree outside Gosling’s office. After trademark concerns, the team renamed it Java, reportedly inspired by coffee.

Java was publicly announced at SunWorld in May 1995, and Sun released Java 1.0 in 1996. Its central attraction was portability: programs were compiled into bytecode that could run on different systems using a JVM.

Oracle is sometimes selected by mistake because it acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010 and now develops and distributes major Java implementations. Microsoft and Google have created tools or products that use Java, but neither company originally developed the Java language itself.