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developed in java and running for decades? how long has the language been around?

19 years. But sun was pushing it quite aggressively at enterprises so it is not rare to see big java installations that are now 15+ years old.

And those are not the most fun to work on.

I started using Java in early '95 (having begged a copy from someone at Sun) and I seemed to be one of the first people writing stuff outside of Sun.

I started in August 1995 when I first heard about it, which I thought was when they released it but it may have had a variety of trickle releases.

I was working on something slightly similar (embedding a VM into a browser) during '94/'95 and was a bit miffed when I first heard of Java....

However, I did think Java was rather good and when I co-founded a start-up in mid '95 we positioned ourselves as a "Java company" - which was no bad thing in the long term as we were in a reasonable position when Netscape, Novell and IBM later decided they wanted to support it. Indeed our 2 round of VC investment was led by Novell - quite unusual for a UK company at the time...

I was doing Java in a very mainstream UK company in 1998; but we were leading edge and it became "standard" in 2000ish. By 2003 there were 100's of developers using it where I worked.

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