Thanks John Gage! and JavaOne 2008

It was a great JavaOne in 2008 . It was very memorable on a number of fronts.

Below was the night of CommunityOne where ten of us on the System Engineering (SE) side of the house in Americas Software Practice went out for a nice dinner.

Above, starting on the left and going clockwise is Jeff Bounds, Pavan Venkatesh, Bill Green, Michael Drevna, Bruce Haddon, Peter Gratzer, Dave Edstrom, Jim Hoffmann, Ron Gregory and Scott Fehrman.

Above is Rich Green, James Gosling, John Gage (holding a Gold Duke Award) Jonathan Schwartz and Chris Melissinos on stage at JavaOne 2008 (video here) after Jonathan presented John with a Gold Duke Award.

John Gage is the most amazing person I have ever met. John is Sun employee #21, the first Sales Rep at Sun, The creator of Net Day, the person who coined Sun's tag line "The Network Is The Computer", “the most connected person ever" as Scott McNealy stated on the last day of JavaOne, the person who did more for Java than anyone else on planet Earth. Yes, James Gosling is known as the Father of Java, but IMHO, without John Gage, Java would have just been another language and not the dominant programming language that it is today. Without John Gage out there explaining the vision of Java, I really don't think Java would have won purely on its programming excellence.

This list of John Gage's accomplishments just go on, and on, and on... I have personally heard John Gage and Bill Joy tell the story on how John came up with Sun's tag line on a train ride in China. That tagline has and will forever stand the test of time. As a matter of fact, at the Odyessys in Technology - Sun Founder Panel that was held to honor the history of Sun Microsystems on January 11 ^th, 2006 at the Computer History Museum, I was the person that went to the microphone and asked John and Bill to retell that story. You can watch the video here.

I have often said that if I had to make a slow train trip across the United States and I had to make a choice between having a super model next to me or John Gage – I would choose John Gage in a femtosecond. John would be able to tell amazing and true stories for the entire trip of places he has been, famous people he has met and remarkable things he has done. BTW, I would make the same choice even if I was single :-)

Thanks for everything John Gage!

Above is Jonathan Schwartz, CEO for Sun Microsystems, John Edstrom, Sun Microsystems Campus Ambassador for Virginia Tech (as well as Campus Ambassador of the Month for Sun in February of this year) and James Gosling, the Father of Java. Oh yeah, I nearly forgot, John is my oldest son as well :-) Thanks to Jonathan and James for taking time out of their busy schedule for a picture with John.

A very special thanks to Chris Melissinos for taking time out of his busy JavaOne schedule to speak with my son John and introducing John to Jonathan and James.