I brought in Java to our multi-company DARPA software project with the first public release, Alpha-something.

1. It was free.

2. Jave code ran unchanged on Sun/Solaris, Windows (95?), and Mac OS.

3. There were GUI components that would sort of look like Motif, Windows, Mac. There was no other multi-platform GUI library that was usable.

4. It had garbage collection. This was a big win.

5. It had the JNI so I could write a Java to C interface layer to the distribution library (COBRA). Later the vendor wrote a 'real' Java interface.

6. It was free, and available for download without budgets, purchase orders, management approvals, and multiple layers of no-sayers.

I had a GUI demo running on a Mac laptop, a Windows box, and a Sun box talking to our servers after one weekend day of programming.

We were not using web browsers or web servers in our system.