Sun Microsystems has kicked off Java's 10th birthday celebrations with a party for employees who have worked on the programming language over the past decade.

The event took place at the company's Santa Clara campus. Sun plans a more public celebration at the JavaOne developer conference in San Francisco 27-30 June.

The company first spoke about Java publicly in 1995, although development had started as early as 1991.

The processor-independent language was created by James Gosling to power an interactive remote control for home entertainment devices, featuring an interactive touch-screen user interface

As the project moved from the development lab to real-world applications, the developers targeted the video on demand market. They were too far ahead of their time, however, and the project failed.

"The scenarios we thought of struck us more as science fiction than reality," Gosling said at the celebration last Friday. "Before Java launched we were wondering what we were doing."

Tim Lindholm, one of the early developers, told vnunet.com: "By mid-1994 we were just trying to keep the Sun brass from killing our project." Lindholm is the architect of the Java 2 Micro Edition platform and currently works as a Distinguished Engineer with Sun.

But the rise of the internet came to the rescue. The developers realised that a language that runs on any device regardless of operating system or hardware would be of great benefit for this new computer network.

"We did have the kind of megalomaniac dreams that we would change computing. That was deliberate without any sense of irony," said Lindholm.

"But we also realised that a new language has zero chance [of making it]. We were amazed that we got any users but, when we got them, we said: 'Of course!'"

In 1995 the technology jumped into the mainstream of computing when Sun and Netscape signed an agreement to bundle Java with the Netscape Navigator browser.

Today Sun claims a total of two billion devices worldwide running Java, most of them mobile phones. But the technology also has a strong position in the world of enterprise application integration and on the web.

"If you're doing a financial transaction today, it has been touched by some of the people here," Gosing told vnunet.com, pointing at the crowd of several hundred people attending the party.