Category Archives: History

Ramblings about how things were better, more interesting, and more a few years back.

The Java Card Forum is 10 years old

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 […]

Small details

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 […]

Java Card is 10 years old

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 […]

Java Card’s intelligent design

While looking for something else, I found a nice paper [JHPC05]written last year by a few guys from Integrity Arts (the start-up from Gemplus that was bought by Sun to form its original Java Card team). The paper includes a history of the ideas that led to Java Card, and it also places them in […]