hiegl.net

I often wondered why the IBM Java virtual machine was termed J9.
Yesterday Brian P. explained this in his internal blog:

So why is it called J9 I hear you ask ?
I don’t think this is a secret so here goes …. In the early SmallTalk days there was a bug in the Virtual Machine that they spent a long time tring to fix. It turned out to be caused by someone specifying an 8k value as 8096. From that moment on all the later (fixed) code was known as the 8K code - except in the codebase the filenames couldn’t start with a number - so K8 was born. So obviously the next Virtual Machine release after that was … J9