I just realized that I missed Java Card’s 15th birthday. This birthday was sometime in the end of October, 1996. I don’t have the exact date, because the only document I have is the Java Card API: Specification of the Java Virtual Machine and Application Programmer’s Interface, version 0.13, dated October 10, 1996. Although this …
Last night, I was preparing an introduction for the Smart University session on Java Card 3.0, and I was looking for Java Card Forum material that would somehow prove how early the work started on that topic. I was expecting something around 2003-2004. I first noticed that in 2004, we already had a first architecture …
Today, CERN’S Large Hadron Collider has started working for the first time. It is not collecting data yet, but when it will, it will generate 300 Gb/second, requiring a significant amount of computing resources. This raw input will be filtered locally into a more reasonable stream of 300Mb/second. That stream will be again processed at …
The picture below is the face of the first GemXpresso card produced at Gemplus, for the Cartes 1997 demo. Those were not the firts Java Card cards (those would have to be Cyberflex cards), but they were the first cards compatible with Java Card 2.0. If you look at it in detail, you can see …
At the end of 1997 and at the beginning of 1998, and around the release of Java Card 2.0, JavaWorld ran a series of articles on Java Card. Most of these articles were written by Sun employees, and in particular Rinaldo di Giorgio, Zhiqun Chen, and Arthur Coleman. These articles are interesting, because they show …
I think that today marks the real anniversary of Java Card technology, as the first official release of the Java Card 2.0 specification is dated October 13, 1997. This is just 6 months after the creation of the Java Card Forum, and the result is far from negligible. Many of the concepts that are still …
I finally found some of the original Java Card 2.0 specifications. It was not all that straightforward, but globally, it was not that difficult, and I should have found all that earlier. The first interesting is that there still is a Java Card 2.0 product page on Sun’s web site. Most of the content is …
The Java Card Forum was officially founded 10 years ago (in February 1997), and its initial members were Schlumberger, Gemplus, and Bull CP8. This creation was a formal move, since the first meeting only happened 2 months later. Nevertheless, this first move started the work on Java Card in all three companies, and also showed …
Every time that a Java Card specification comes out, I like to think that it is a good specification, and in particular that it provides complete information for developers. We have tried hard, but the completeness remains hard to reach. Not that the spec is bad, which is not true. The Java Card Forum has …
According to offical history, Java Card turns 10 years old this month. In October 1996, Sun released the Java Card 1.0 specification. This was not a very big event, as only Schlumberger were actively working on it. And at Sun, not many people knew what smart cards were. The Java Card 1.0 specification was a …
