--- title: Elevators, toasters, and the birth of Java | daily.dev description: James Gosling, the creator of Java at Sun Microsystems, discusses the language's origins in a conversation with Ryan. They cover early networking friction that... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/elevators-toasters-and-the-birth-of-java-kmboxiuxa twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Elevators, toasters, and the birth of Java | daily.dev og:description: James Gosling, the creator of Java at Sun Microsystems, discusses the language's origins in a conversation with Ryan. They cover early networking friction that... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/elevators-toasters-and-the-birth-of-java-kmboxiuxa og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/KMBoxIuxa.png og:image:alt: Elevators, toasters, and the birth of Java og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Elevators, toasters, and the birth of Java **[Stack Overflow Blog](https://daily.dev/sources/stackov)** · 3 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary James Gosling, the creator of Java at Sun Microsystems, discusses the language's origins in a conversation with Ryan. They cover early networking friction that drove the need for interconnected devices and the strict reliability demands of consumer electronics companies that shaped the Java virtual machine. The conversation also touches on how garbage collectors evolved to let Java handle large-scale concurrent memory management. A related Java documentary from CultRepo is mentioned as further reading on the language's early history. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### Why did James Gosling design the Java virtual machine the way he did? James Gosling, Java's creator at Sun Microsystems, says the JVM's design was shaped by the stringent reliability requirements of consumer electronics companies. Early networking friction also drove the need for interconnected devices, pushing toward a platform-independent runtime that could work reliably across many kinds of hardware, including things like elevators and toasters. _Developers curious about Java's design roots can follow more language history deep dives on daily.dev._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [The good ol’ days of building Java](https://daily.dev/posts/the-good-ol-days-of-building-java-bhtxfwlhl) · Stack Overflow Blog · 7 upvotes · 0 comments - [The Java Story: A Film About All of Us](https://daily.dev/posts/the-java-story-a-film-about-all-of-us-bypyskrfu) · Foojay.io · 10 upvotes · 0 comments - [java sucks](https://daily.dev/posts/java-sucks-crkmaohix) · Lobsters · 10 upvotes · 12 comments --- Tags: [#java](https://daily.dev/tags/java), [#jvm](https://daily.dev/tags/jvm) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/elevators-toasters-and-the-birth-of-java-kmboxiuxa) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Elevators, toasters, and the birth of Java","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/elevators-toasters-and-the-birth-of-java-kmboxiuxa","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/elevators-toasters-and-the-birth-of-java-kmboxiuxa"},"datePublished":"2026-10-27T04:23:43.979Z","dateModified":"2026-10-27T04:24:06.151Z","description":"James Gosling, the creator of Java at Sun Microsystems, discusses the language's origins in a conversation with Ryan. 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