SUN, SONY AND PHILLIPS JOIN TO DEVELOP A POST-PC ERA 

Sun Microsystems was forming an alliance with consumer electronics giants 
Sony Corporation and Royal Phillips Electronics NV to integrate Sun's Jini 
(pronounced gee-nee) programming environment with the HAVI (Home Audio 
Visual Interoperability) architecture developed by Sony, Phillips and 
others;  the result of this integration was the creation of a new 
generation of networked entertainment devices and appliances (TVs, stereos, 
VCRs, thermostats, etc.) that can communicate with humans and each other 
over the Internet.  New York Times information technology analyst John 
Markoff says:  "Both the Sun Jini and the new Microsoft Universal Plug and 
Play alliance appear to be attempts to do roughly similar tasks," but the 
two technologies "represent deep philosophical differences. Microsoft and 
the personal computer makers are developing standards for a PC-centric 
vision of the home of the future, in which a personal computer controls 
everything from energy efficiency to telephone messaging and video 
delivery. In contrast, the Jini-HAVI alliance is a radical decentralized 
approach to computing in which control is spread throughout a network with 
no central point.  In the Jini-HAVI vision of the world, the consumer could 
control all the appliances in a networked home from a personal computer but 
could also use a television or even some all-in-one infrared remote control 
device." 
(New York Times 19 Jan 99) 

Sun's JINI Whitepapers 
 

Transvirtual's Kaffe OpenVM 
Dec 18th, 1998 - The University of Utah's new release of the OSKit, a novel component-based kit for building or extending operating systems, supports Kaffe OpenVM booting on the bare PC hardware: a fully open source Java computer! 
Dec 8th, 1998 - Kaffe OpenVM Beta 3 released. 

     Publications 

Apple Developer Connection's Java Developer Documentation
 
 

Jeni OS  
http://www.jenios.com 
a project for a new Unix clone