In 1990's James Ghosling and his team tried to develop a portable application that can run on any microchip. The team choose C++ to accomplish this task. But soon they found that there are many features in c++ that prevent it from being PORTABLE. Therefore they tried to remove features that are plateform dependent. In doing so, they ended up developing a new programming language called Oak. Some say that the reason simply being that the team leader James Gosling spent most of the time under a Oak tree so they choose this name. Sun Microsystem renamed Oak to Java in 1995.

Java 1.0 (January 1996): Initial release.

Java 1.1 (February 1997): Introduced inner classes and JDBC.

Java 2 (December 1998): Versions 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4 introduced Swing, Collections, and other      features.

Java 5 (September 2004): Introduced generics and enhanced for loop.

Java 6 (December 2006): Improved performance and added scripting support.

Java 7 (July 2011): Introduced try-with-resources and diamond operator.

Java 8 (March 2014): Major release with lambdas and Stream API.

Java 9 (September 2017): Introduced module system (Project Jigsaw).

Java 10 (March 2018): Modest release with local-variable type inference.

Java 11 (September 2018): First LTS under the new release model.

Java 12–17 (2019–2021): Incremental releases with various features and improvements.

Java 18 (Future): Expected to continue the evolution of the language.

Simple

Object-Oriented

Portable

Platform independent

Secured

Robust

Architecture neutral

Interpreted

High Performance

Multithreaded

Distributed

Dynamic