A brief history of java:

James Gosling

The history of Java Language is more interesting. The history of Java starts from “Green Project”. In 1991 The Green Project initiated by James Gosling, Mike Sheridan, and Patrick Naughton. A small group of Sun engineers called the "Green Team" believed that the next wave in computing was the union of digital consumer devices and computers. Led by James Gosling, the team worked around the clock and created the programming language that would revolutionize our world – Java.

 

The language was initially called Oak (Oak is a symbol of strength and chosen as a national tree of many countries like U.S.A., France, Germany, Romania etc).

Later the project went by the name Green and was finally renamed Java, from Java coffee (produced in the Java, is an island of Indonesia). 

Sun Microsystems released the first public implementation as Java 1.0 in 1995. It promised "Write Once, Run Anywhere" (WORA), providing no-cost run-times on popular platforms. After that new versions had multiple configurations built for different types of platforms. J2EE included technologies and APIs for enterprise applications typically run in server environments, while J2ME featured APIs optimized for mobile applications. The desktop version was renamed J2SE. In 2006, for marketing purposes, Sun renamed new J2 versions as Java EE, Java ME, and Java SE, respectively.

Java Version History:

There are many java versions that has been released. Current stable release of Java is Java SE 9.

Duke, The Java mascot

• JDK 1.0 (23 January, 1996)
• JDK 1.1 (19 February, 1997)
• J2SE 1.2 (8  December, 1998)
• J2SE 1.3 (8  May, 2000)
• J2SE 1.4 (6 February, 2002)
• J2SE 5.0 (30 September, 2004)
• Java SE 6 (11 December, 2006)
• Java SE 7 (28 July, 2011)
• Java SE 8 (18 March, 2014)
• Java SE 9 (21 September, 2017)