Yes, and that's why COBOL was the last big enterprise language. Java is the new COBOL. A lot of corporations hung onto COBOL through the 80s and early 90s, skipping the C/C++ wave, and going straight to Java.
That was gold. Thank you for that.
Based on your answer, seems like there was an extremely close alliance between the big corps (sans MSFT) and the early Java dev team; I'm tempted to think that the creators (Gosling et al) could have taken cues from Java's corporate supporters to factor in designs that help address problems that those companies were facing. This really helps tie in how the Java "ecosystem" came to being because right from the beginning it seems like it was trying to solve "enterprisey" problems. Is that a fair assumption?
For instance even though Java 1.0 was released in 1996, IBM got on board in 1995 and by the start of 1997 had contributed good internationalization. (See http://www.icu-project.org/docs/papers/history_of_java_inter... for a reference.) By late 1997 when I became a software developer, there was already a feeling that Java was "the official corporate future of the web". (At least by those who didn't expect Microsoft to take over the world.) But in the meantime would I mind learning Perl and CGI to teach my co-workers how to get small stuff done?
I never looked back. :-)
ADDITION: See http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1998-09-11/news/990112009... for an early timeline. Note the many, many corporate licensees very early in the process.
The truth is that everyone was deathly afraid that Microsoft would destroy the industry. The web was seen as a godsend, and the fact that Java wound up tied to the web by Netscape right at the beginning meant that everyone jumped on Java with the web. By the time the dust settled, you had a ton of big corporations involved, and it was guaranteed at that point that the language would evolve to suit their needs.
We were mostly writing applications, applets, and command-line stuff, and my first server-side code was in a long-forgotten CGI-based scripting language, but I seem to recall it wasn't too long after that that ColdFusion was re-written into Java (so that even if you build your site in CF, it was actually executing on Java); that was a pretty strong corporate & technical endorsement.
In the defense of competing systems, the POSIX standard for threads was released in 1995 and Java was released in 1996. So they can hardly be blamed for not having optimized for that then uncommon use case. But by the time they fixed that, Solaris had already taken a solid market lead. Which helped Sun become "the dot in dot com".
Thanks to the corporate support that went into it, Java built strong ecosystems in a number of areas. The viability of multiple strong corporate supporters made it a safe choice for any enterprise that wanted an option that was tied to the web which wasn't tied to Microsoft. This gave them a base that it never lost.
It is worth noting that Microsoft took note of this competitor, and did their standard "embrace, extend, extinguish" approach. However they got sued by Sun for adding Windows only extensions, and after they lost that, Sun was able to ensure continued consistency.
Random note. Java is far from the first portable cross-platform language to be marketed on that basis. See COBOL.
Random amusing note. While Java was marketed as being cross-platform, it used threading in a way that Solaris was designed for and competing Unix systems were not. I've never considered it coincidence that Solaris wound up soundly beating the other Unix systems in "portable Java benchmarks" and that was when it became the dominant version of Unix.