Gosling started more abstractly based on virtual machines he had built in the past for some pretty bizarre hardware. This was to be general-purpose.

Set top boxes were a very early use case. It coincided with the boom of these types of systems that were growing past the traditional “embedded” boundaries. Gosling and the team were working on that when it was still Oak and hadn’t been branded.

There’s an amazing video of him telling the story. I think it’s on YouTube.