In the mid-1990s, Sun Microsystems planned for Java to enable write-once-run-anywhere software, but slow and disappointing Java applets in web pages were the result.
However, much of what is used today quietly runs Java in the background, so Java-based future may yet happen.
One JavaStation from the mid-1990s has been configured to run NetBSD, which illustrates some modern-day networking tricks, and is perhaps more useful than the original JavaOS.
The OpenBoot prompt, in common with Apple machines in the ’90s, gives a Forth interpreter, and is sufficient to load the NVRAM with a useful config.
To do anything useful takes a network with RARP and NFS to serve an IP address and disk image respectively, which a modern Linux machine is capable of providing.
