C provided a "middle-level" balance. It was powerful enough to talk directly to hardware but simple enough to be portable across different systems.
It became the "mother of all languages," directly influencing almost every modern language today, including Java. Java: The "Write Once, Run Anywhere" Rebel (1990s)
Gosling initially tried to use C++, but found it too complex and prone to security bugs, specifically "pointer bugs" that caused frequent crashes.
In the early '70s, programming was tied to specific hardware. If you wanted to move a program to a new machine, you often had to rewrite it.
In 1991, and his "Green Team" at Sun Microsystems set out to build software for consumer electronics, like set-top boxes.
The story of Java and C is a tale of two different eras in computing: one born from the need to build operating systems, and the other from the dream of universal connectivity.
