On a Dutch website I read that
Java was first released on
April May 23, 1995. That is exactly 20 years ago tomorrow. That was not yet version 1.0 - that came out on January 23, 1996. (I couldn't find any other website that mentioned the exact date of May 23, 1995 - many websites say "1995" but not the exact date).
My first experience with Java was in 1998. I had the book
Java Unleashed, which has a star on the front that says "Covers Java 1.0!". Together with a colleague I learned Java in my free time. At work I was programming in C++ at that time. Our project was to write an
applet to play chess. It displayed a chess board, on which you could drag and drop chess pieces and play against the computer.
It went quickly from there, a year later our company formed a new department for Java projects, and I switched from C++ to Java. I started working on
J2EE projects. And I've been working with Java ever since.
How and when did you get started with Java?
Java at 20: How it changed programming forever