James Gosling around June 1991 created a project called “Oak” while working with Sun Microsystems. Back then C and C++ where the defactor languages with some great features. They were not simple to use and can be improved. Hence Gosling’s goal was to implements a language that had a familiar C/C++ like notation but with greater uniformity and simplicity.
Even more, and most notable feature, was to create a virtual machine (VM) to run Oak. The virtual machine to be independent of the Operating System or environment that runs it. At some point Oak became Java through Sun Microsystems and the software programming community specifications.