In the 1990s it looked very much as if desktop and server heterogeneity would be the norm. That you'd pick between alternatives like Solaris on SPARC, HP-UX on PA-RISC, Irix on MIPS, Windows on Alpha / MIPS / x86 / PowerPC, MacOS on PowerPC, OS/2 on PowerPC / x86 etc etc.

The designers of Java, as well as software community at large, had dealt with the pain of moving large codebases across platforms and so the WORA promise was very appealing.