Java was invented by James Gosling and others at Sun Microsystems in 1994 as an object-oriented programming language with built-in APIs. It is platform independent, allows for dynamic binding and distributed applications, and is portable, multithreaded, and robust. The document discusses Java's key features and packages like java.lang and java.io, how to create user-defined packages, and provides examples of a Sudoku solver program. It concludes that Java offers type safety but needs more expressive power.