As the recently appointed CEO for LegacyJ -- the 10-year "new" name for Synkronix -- I have a variety of facts that may be of value to your readers. Our architect, Brian Sullivan, took the bold step in 1995 to conclude that the object-oriented profile of Sun's new Java language -- and Sun's backing -- would create the environment needed to move old Cobol applications "seamlessly"... All you had to do was create a translation engine significantly in advance of the introduction of J2EE, most of JVM, most of why you could verify that this was, indeed, an outstanding selection -- not a wild-eyed graduate degree programmer's mistake...

Still, it was 5+ years before Java was close to becoming the standard it is today.