For years, programmers have had to go through the hassles of porting software from BSD-based UNIX to System V Release 4-based UNIX, from OpenWindows to Motif, from PC to UNIX to Macintosh (or some combination thereof), and between various other alternatives, too numerous to mention.
Getting an application to work was only part of the problem; you also had to port it to all the platforms you supported, which often took more time than the development effort itself.
In the UNIX world, standards like POSIX and X made it easier to move applications between different UNIX platforms. But they only solved part of the problem and didn\’t provide any help with the PC world. Portability became even more important as the Internet grew.
The goal was clear: wouldn\’t it be great if you could just move applications between different operating environments without worrying about the software breaking because of a different operating system, windowing environment, or internal data representation?
