A new documentary, "The Java Story," which debuted on YouTube, reveals how close Java came to never existing, with original JVM developer Tim Lindholm telling The Register that Sun Microsystems was on the verge of scrapping the project in 1994. Java began as Oak, a language written by James Gosling for a Sun spin-off called FirstPerson, whose main goal was winning a Time Warner contract to power interactive video-on-demand set-top boxes. That bid was lost to rival Silicon Graphics, prompting heavy layoffs, yet the technology survived to become one of the most widely used programming languages in enterprise computing today.

The documentary, produced by Cult.Repo (a spin-off of the team behind Honeypot.io's earlier films on C++, Python and React), features key figures including Gosling and Oracle architects Mark Reinhold and Brian Goetz. Lindholm, who had been at FirstPerson for only a month when the Time Warner deal collapsed in 1997, shared additional behind-the-scenes detail with The Register about the project's precarious early state, including a last-minute rewrite reportedly completed just three days before a major public conference demonstration, underscoring how narrowly Java avoided failure before becoming a mainstay of the TIOBE popularity index.