ava started as a project called "Oak" (The name came from an oak tree that stood outside the Sun Microsystems office) by James Gosling in June 1991 for use in a set top box project.^[3] Gosling's goals were to implement a virtual machine and a language that had a familiar C/C++ style of notation. The first public implementation was Java 1.0 in 1995. It promised "Write Once, Run Anywhere" (WORA), providing no-cost runtimes on popular platforms. It was fairly secure and its security was configurable, allowing network and file access to be restricted. Major web browsers soon incorporated the ability to run secure Java "applets" within web pages. Java became popular quickly. With the advent of "Java 2", new versions had multiple configurations built for different types of platforms. For example, J2EE was for enterprise applications and the greatly stripped down version J2ME was for mobile applications. J2SE was the designation for the Standard Edition. In 2006, new "J2" versions were renamed Java EE, Java ME, and Java SE, respectively.

In 1997, Sun approached the ISO/IEC JTC1 standards body and later the Ecma International to formalize Java, but it soon withdrew from the process.^[4][5][6] Java remains a proprietary de facto standard that is controlled through the Java Community Process.^[7] Sun makes most of its Java implementations available without charge, with revenue being generated by specialized products such as the Java Enterprise System. Sun distinguishes between its Software Development Kit (SDK) and Runtime Environment (JRE) which is a subset of the SDK, the primary distinction being that in the JRE the compiler is not present.

On November 13, 2006, Sun released parts of Java as free/open source software, under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The release of the complete source code under GPL is expected in the first half of 2007.

BASIC

Microsoft staff photo from December 7, 1978. Gates on bottom row, far left.

After reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800, Gates contacted MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform.^[20] In reality, Gates and Allen did not have an Altair and had not written code for it; they merely wanted to gauge MITS's interest. MITS president Ed Roberts agreed to meet them for a demo, and over the course of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration, held at MITS's offices in Albuquerque, was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC. Paul Allen hired into MITS,^[21] and Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work with Allen at MITS, dubbing their partnership "Micro-soft" in November 1975.^[21] Within a year, the hyphen was dropped, and on November 26, 1976, the tradename "Microsoft" was registered with the USPTO.^[21]

Microsoft's BASIC was popular with computer hobbyists, but Gates discovered that a pre-market copy had leaked into the community and was being widely copied and distributed. In February 1976, Gates wrote an Open Letter to Hobbyists in the MITS newsletter saying that MITS could not continue to produce, distribute, and maintain high-quality software without payment.^[22] This letter was unpopular with many computer hobbyists, but Gates persisted in his belief that software developers should be able to demand payment. Microsoft became independent of MITS in late 1976, and it continued to develop programming language software for various systems.

According to Gates, people at Microsoft often did more than one job during the early years; whoever answered the phone when an order came in was responsible for packing and mailing it. Gates oversaw the business details, but continued to write code as well. In the first five years, he personally reviewed every line of code the company shipped, and often rewrote parts of it as he saw fit

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein (German pronunciation (help·info)) (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist who is widely considered to have been one of the greatest physicists of all time. While best known for the theory of relativity (and specifically mass-energy equivalence, E = mc2), he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.”[1]

Einstein's many contributions to physics include his special theory of relativity, which reconciled mechanics with electromagnetism, and his general theory of relativity which extended the principle of relativity to nonuniform motion, creating a new theory of gravitation. His other contributions include relativistic cosmology, capillary action, critical opalescence, classical problems of statistical mechanics and their application to quantum theory, an explanation of the Brownian movement of molecules, atomic transition probabilities, the quantum theory of a monatomic gas, thermal properties of light with low radiation density (which laid the foundation for the photon theory), a theory of radiation including stimulated emission, the conception of a unified field theory, and the geometrization of physics.

Works by Albert Einstein include more than fifty scientific papers but also non-scientific works, including About Zionism: Speeches and Lectures by Professor Albert Einstein. (1930), Why War? (1933, co-authored by Sigmund Freud), The World As I See It (1934), Out of My Later Years (1950), and a book on science for the general reader, The Evolution of Physics (1938, co-authored by Leopold Infeld).[2]

In 1999 Einstein was named Time magazine's "Person of the Century". In popular culture the name "Einstein" has become synonymous with genius.