In today’s computing world the concept of the virtual machine has been used to solve many problems. From partitioning the machine (The IBM model), to creating a semi-platform independent programming language (The Java model), to creating operating systems (The Unix model and The OSI model), the concept of virtual machines has proven to be a powerful tool in shaping today’s computer. However, this idea was not always clear to everyone and it was not until the mid 1960’s that this idea was put into practice.

Around 1965 the researchers at IBM were attempting to measure the actual effectiveness of some new ideas in the computer science field. The researchers needed a way to shut off these new features so they could measure the performance of the machine with the options both on and off. These researchers were based at the IBM Yorktown Research center. They devised a scheme where they needed to be able to partition the machine into "smaller pieces". These pieces needed to be able to manage their own resources so that the researchers could test many different conditions in the system at the same time without altering the other "pieces" of the system. They believed an implementation as a virtual machine could work extremely well for this experiment.

After this experiment, IBM eventually went on and developed an implementation of its notion of a virtual machine and began selling it as a real world Operating System for multiple user environments. Many businesses and universities use this Operating System because it allows them to share the power and resources available on their mainframe computers with many people. Each user has his/her own virtual machine that they work within, thereby sharing the resources with every other user without affecting those other users. This machine is now known as the IBM System 370 (S/370) and the IBM System 390 (S/390). These machines make use of the IBM VM/ESA operating system and are collectively referred to as IBM’s VM lineage.

This implementation of virtual machines has proven to be quite powerful, as it is a machine that is still being sold today. The idea of virtual machines has since been used to solve many other computing problems. Problems such as computer program portability and operating system design. One of the first implementations to utilize virtual machines to address these problems was the Unix operating system.

The Unix operating system was spawned from a paper published, in 1974, by Denise Richie and Ken Thompson of Bell Labs. Their idea for the Unix operating system was quickly adapted in PDP-11 computers used in universities. From universities it was quickly spread to the commercial computer industry by graduating students. From 1980 to 1985 the IEEE standards board began POSIX (Portable Operating System) project to provide a standard for Unix Library functions. The idea was that any software producer could write program code using the standard library functions and port the code to any Unix system. In 1990 the IEEE POSIX project published "Information Technology Portable Operating System Interface. This specified the standard for Unix shell and utility routines, which formalized specification for Unix Application Interface enabling Unix processes to operate as separate virtual machines.

One problem that has plagued programmers for many years is the idea of creating truly portable computer programs. In other words, programmers want to write one program that will work on any platform. In the mid 1990’s this idea has nearly been made possible utilizing the idea of the virtual machines to create the Java programming language.

The idea of the Java programming language, however, was not a new idea in the 1990’s. It was actually thought of in the late 1970's by a gentleman named Bill Joy. Joy thought about creating a language that would merge the best features of MESA and C. Other projects (like co-founding Sun), however, intervened and it would be many years before this idea became a reality. By the early 90's Joy was getting tired of huge programs. In late 1990 Joy wrote a paper called Further which outlined his pitch to Sun engineers that they should produce an object environment based on C++. Around this time James Gosling had been working for several months on an SGML editor called "Imagination" using C++. Due to Gosling’s frustration with C++ on this "Imagination" project, the Oak programming language was created.

Patrick Naughton started the Green Project on December 5th, 1990. Naughton defined the project as an effort to "do fewer things better". That December he recruited Gosling and Mike Sheridan to help start the project. Joy showed them his Further paper, and work began on graphics and user interface issues for several months in C.

In April of 1991 the Green Project (Naughton, Gosling and Sheridan) settled on smart consumer electronics as the delivery platform, and Gosling started working heavily on the Oak programming language. Gosling wrote the original compiler in C; and Naughton, Gosling and Sheridan wrote the runtime-interpreter, also in C. Oak was running its first programs in August of 1991.

By the fall of 1992 "*7", a cross between a PDA and a remote control, was ready This was demoed to Scott McNealy, Sun's president, in October. Following that the Green Project was set up as First Person Inc., a wholly owned Sun subsidiary. In early 1993 the Green team heard about a Time-Warner request for proposal for a settop box operating system. First Person quickly shifted focus from smart consumer electronics to the set-top box OS market, and placed a bid with Time-Warner. Fortuitously, Sun lost the bid. First Person continued work on settop boxes until early 1994, when it concluded that like smart consumer electronics settop boxes were more hype than reality.

Without a market to be seen First Person was rolled back into Sun in 1994. However around this time it was realized that the requirements for smart consumer electronics and settop box software (small, platform independent secure reliable code) were the same requirements for the nascent web. For a third time the project was redirected, this time at the web. A prototype browser called WebRunner was written by Patrick Naughton. After additional work by Naughton and Jonathan Payne this browser became HotJava. In 1995 Oak was renamed Java. In May of 1995 the first Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.0 alpha was released. Since that time there have been several revisions leading up to the current version of the JDK 1.2.