"
Excerpt from Java: The Inside Story by SunWorld Online
“We were trying to build a distributed system that would make sense as a business [product]...to sell modern software technology to consumer electronics manufacturers,” James Gosling said.
To make development a more platform-neutral process (and thus accommodate the consumer market’s demand for CPU flexibility, Gosling began by extending the C++ compiler. Eventually, however, he realized that even with lots of extras, C++ would not suffice. Thus, Oak [programming language] was conceived in mid-1991.