Microsoft Java Virtual Machine

~ the eulogy ~

For most of the applet years there were two ways to run Java on Windows, and the one already sitting on the machine was not the one Sun wrote. It arrived on 13 August 1996 attached to Internet Explorer 3, and after that it came down with the browser and with the operating system, service pack after service pack. Nobody chose it.

It was also, for its first two years, the quickest Java on the platform by a clear margin. PC Magazine gave it the Editors' Choice for Java support in 1997 and again in 1998. Microsoft did not get there by accident; the team wired the runtime into Windows instead of sitting it on top, and the numbers followed.

That wiring is the whole case. Microsoft shipped extensions with names like J/Direct and the Raw Native Interface, which let a Java program reach straight into Windows APIs. Code written that way ran beautifully and ran nowhere else. At the same time the implementation left parts of Java 1.1 unfinished, so code written to the standard could fail on the runtime that most Windows users had.

Sun sued in October 1997. During the antitrust trial the government put internal Microsoft documents in front of the court describing the objective as killing cross-platform Java by growing what they called the polluted Java market, which is a sentence that saved the plaintiffs a lot of work.

Here the distance is close, because this is the Java I actually had. Sun's runtime was a download, and on a dial-up line in Turkey a download of that size was a decision with a cost attached to it and a real chance of dropping at eighty percent. The Microsoft one was already there, no wait and no bill. So through the years I was on a modem, the runtime on my machine was the one a court was in the middle of switching off, and I knew the other one was more correct and got it anyway only when the line got fast enough not to care.

~ the dossier ~

~ the fastest one on windows ~

Speed was the argument Microsoft made in public and it held up for a while. Java's early problem everywhere was that applets felt slow, and a runtime that talked to the host system without a translation layer in between felt less slow. Microsoft added the standard Java Native Interface in 1998 alongside its own, so for a moment the product had both.

IBM broke the claim in 1999 with a virtual machine that beat both Microsoft and Sun on the Volano benchmark, and by then it was not the point anyway. The dispute had moved out of engineering and into a courtroom, where the question was not whether the runtime was fast but whether it was Java.

~ what sun sued over ~

The license Sun wrote required a complete implementation, and the argument was that Microsoft had shipped an incomplete one on purpose while calling it Java in the marketing. In January 2001 the two settled. Microsoft paid twenty million dollars and agreed a plan to phase out every product carrying the disputed version, which turned out to be a long list: Windows 98 and Windows Me, Internet Explorer 5.5, the Office 2000 and Office XP developer editions, BackOffice Server 2000, ISA Server 2000, Visual Studio 6.

The settlement is also why Windows XP shipped in October 2001 with no Java at all, and why anyone who wanted an applet to run had to go and fetch a runtime from somebody. That is the moment the default stopped being automatic, and a lot of ordinary users found out that Java was a thing you install.

~ turning it off in stages ~

What followed reads like a machine grinding down rather than a product being killed. Service Pack 1 for Windows XP, on 9 September 2002, put the Microsoft runtime back in the box. Service Pack 1a in February 2003 took it out again to comply with the settlement, so the same operating system shipped with it and without it inside five months.

In October 2003 Microsoft and Sun signed a maintenance license giving customers a year of warning: distribution could continue until 30 September 2004, and after that the only permitted changes were security fixes. Support ran on quietly until 31 December 2007. By then applets were already losing to Flash, and the browser plugin that Microsoft had fought a lawsuit over was worth less than the lawsuit had cost either side.

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