Back then, Sun had to spend a fortune to push Java down the throats of developers. Mostly by selling it to their clueless managers instead.

Java was born out of a trend and still lives as one to this day, good thing only the corporate world really bought into it!

The reason its so popular with corporates is that most of the expensive problems are already solved so building software is sticking a few well proven components together with some glue. It's also good at managing memory for you, which is not something that can be said for most languages.

When java turned up, we were all still writing c. C++ was still fairly unstable then. Microsoft's compiler was actually probably the best on the market and it was still a hunk of shit to the point that most people just did win32+c. On UNIX it was always C.