Paul Tyma recalls the phone call from Bob Cringely that launched his 1990s Java career
ArtificialOther · x · 2026-11-03
Paul Tyma shares a 1996 anecdote: as a PhD student at Syracuse, he got a call from tech journalist Bob Cringely, who claimed to have read 7 Java books and called his the best.
Tyma notes only about two Java books existed then. His advisor Doug Lea, an early Sun Java team member, introduced the language to grad students—around four of them wrote books riding the hype.
Book writing paid little but brought conference talks and corporate training gigs, which led Tyma and a friend to start a Java training company. A nostalgic slice of 1990s programmer culture.
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