Bill Gates was prescient about many things we are living with right now - video-on-demand, online shopping, "wallet PCs" (smartphones), voice recognition, "social interfaces" (Siri, Alexa). I recommend his book The Road Ahead (1995).

Java was derived from a language called Oak, which was intended to run on set-top boxes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_(programming_language)

The 1990s had two big things: The Web and cable TV. The smart money was on convergence, which meant that the Web would merge with cable TV and create something entirely new. This happened, kinda, but not in the way people back then imagined; as it turns out, "Cable TV" + "The Internet" = "The Internet" so "Convergence" is just doing everything over an Internet connection.

It really is wild to me (with the unquestioned gift of hindsight) that all of these companies saw these massive developments in CPUs, fiber optics, etc. and their immediate reaction was solely a lust for the future in the form of video on demand specifically. Kinda like an inverted form of that alleged Henry Ford quote, if you asked a corporation what they thought the future was then they would say a better TV.