In 1995 Sun Microsystems created the Java programming language and runtime environment in a bid to create an operating system agnostic programming platform that would allow programmers to “write once, run anywhere”—free from having to choose what operating system to support. Rasband found this idea appealing and liked the idea of maintaining a single code base that could run in any operating system with the Java runtime environment installed or on a Web browser as a Java applet, thus allowing a single program to be run not only on the Mac and Windows platforms but also on the Unix operating system that was becoming popular among scientists. Furthermore, after using Pascal for over 20 years, Rasband was ready to try another programming language.
