Java was developed in 1991 by James Gosling, Mike Sheridan, and Patrick Naughton at Sun Microsystems. It was originally called "Oak" but was renamed to Java in 1995. Java was created to be platform independent, allowing programs written in Java to run on any device without modification, unlike other languages at the time. This platform independence is known as "write once, run anywhere." Java was later acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2010 and continues to be updated with new versions, the most recent being Java SE9 released in September 2017.