In May 1995, Sun Microsystems brought Java out of the lab and announced it publicly at the SunWorld conference. The Computer History Museum’s record of the event states that “Sun Microsystems Inc. formally announced its new programs, Java and HotJava at the SunWorld ‘95 convention,” presenting both the new language and a web browser written in it.
The launch matters because it tied a new programming language directly to the rapidly growing World Wide Web. Java promised that the same compiled program could run on Macintosh, IBM-compatible, and Unix machines, removing the compatibility barriers that had long divided software across different kinds of computers.
The announcement was the public beginning of a platform, not just a language. Over the following years Sun shipped the Java Development Kit and the Java Virtual Machine, and the language defined by what became the Java Language Specification grew into one of the most widely used technologies in business and server computing.
This entry treats the launch as a milestone in mid-1995. The specific day commonly cited for the SunWorld announcement is May 23, 1995, though the broader significance lies in the public arrival of a portable, network-oriented language during the early commercial web.