They are using the past tense of Java. In case you don’t know, the primary use of Java when it came out was to run “applets” inside the browser. And it was terrible. It was later when it became mostly a server-side thing (which at the time was dominated by languages like Perl, PHP, etc.)

To be precise, applets were an early application of Java. But Sun Microsystems actually developed it in the long-standing dream of the “universal binary.”

The project began in 1991 targeting set-top boxes. [source](https://web.archive.org/web/20100210225651/http://www.java.c...)

WASM is another iteration of the same noble idea done with different technologies at a different moment.

Java and the JVM have been incredibly successful. WASM has the potential to bring the dream of a universal binary even farther.

>But Sun Microsystems actually developed it in the long-standing dream of the “universal binary.”

Never heard of UCSD Pascal?

History is rewritten one faulty comment at the time.

Java could have been made to run well in a browser, giving applets good access to the DOM of their containing page wouldn't have been too difficult.

Not only it wasn't, it has always been possible to do so from Applets.

When I wrote good access, I was really thinking that Java would have needed to provide an API at least as good as JQuery, not just a low-level way to walk nodes in a tree.

The API was there nevertheless.

It did once upon a time, and ironically there are now WASM versions as well.

It used to, though.