HotJava 1.0 alpha2

[some-java-user-99206970363698485155 at vodafonemail.de]

Hello,
it appears HotJava 1.0 alpha2 is available under [0]. This is to my knowledge the oldest publicly 
available Java version. This version is also quite interesting because:
- According to [1] it is the first version after the "O.A.K" -> "Java" rename
- Not all packages start with `java` yet, see [2]
- Its class files use major version 45, minor version 2; back then the class file format was 
slightly different and the JDK has still code for compatibility with these old class files ([3])
- It includes a pretty great picture of the HotJava team ([4])

Sadly discovering all of its files is quite cumbersome, and maybe even impossible (many of them 
are not linked).
I hoped that you (the JDK team) is interested in these files as well and could contact MIT. I 
assume you as official representatives will be more successful than some random guy like me (I 
have not tried yet).
It would be really awesome if all these files were publicly available so people can understand 
the history of Java and the JDK better and maybe even toy with this old version (it appears it 
even includes `javac`[5]!).

Let me know what you think about this. And sorry for this rather off-topic mail on this mailing 
list.

Kind regards

---

[0] http://www.mit.edu/afs.new/sipb/user/marc/hotjava/
Though prefer browsing the archived version (link below), who knows what MIT does when they 
notice a sudden increase in requests to a particular site
https://web.archive.org/web/20190822201611/http://www.mit.edu/afs.new/sipb/user/marc/hotjava/

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190822201108/http://www.mit.edu/afs.new/sipb/user/marc/hotjava/doc/changes/changes.html
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20190822201108/http://www.mit.edu/afs.new/sipb/user/marc/hotjava/doc/api/packages.html
[3] https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/e98ba531a28234b09e3a8a0319a6322a291425a2/src/hotspot/share/classfile/classFileParser.cpp#L2451
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20190822201619/http://www.mit.edu/afs.new/sipb/user/marc/hotjava/doc/people.html
[5] https://web.archive.org/web/20190822231416/http://www.mit.edu/afs.new/sipb/user/marc/hotjava/bin/sun4/javac