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June 4, 2001 -- On May 24, 2001, Java technology and its beloved mascot, Duke, celebrated their sixth birthday. James Gosling, Java technology architect and vice president at Sun Microsystems, was there at the very beginning when Duke was just a gleam in an artist's eye. He sat down to talk with us about Duke, who at the 2001 JavaOne Conference makes his debut in a comic book. Interviewer: Tell us about your involvement with Duke. Gosling: I've been involved with Duke since the very beginning. I even have a patent plaque with Duke's picture on it. Duke started out as part of something called the Green Project, in which we were trying to do a lot of different things. One of the areas we were playing with was user interface, so we thought it would be interesting to have a user interface that had some personality. We wanted something like a cartoon character to represent the personality of the system. An artist, Joe Palrang, who was doing artwork for the user interface, designed a character that went through all kinds of different versions. I have a picture of Duke done as a robot -- he makes a cool robot. Interviewer: Why isn't Duke a robot today? Gosling: We wanted something that could show up on the screen in a relatively small area and yet still be recognizable and comprehensible, something you could put a lot of emotion and gestural activity into, and still be about the size of a postage stamp. A lot of the designs we tried out, like the robot one, had a lot of detail. Whenever you take something with a lot of detail and shrink it down, it becomes pretty unrecognizable, so we needed something that was really simple, but that had enough structure to be emotional. You can get a lot of emotion out of things like how the figure cocks his head and how he shows his nose, so Duke has a very flexible head. He also has big hands. Interviewer: Why is his head pointed? Gosling: We wanted people to be able to tell if Duke was looking back or sideways -- to be able to register his head motion. The pointy bit on his head is actually really good to wave around so you can get some idea of where he is looking. If he had a completely rounded head and turned his head backwards, you would never know it. Then all you'd have was him sliding his nose out. You need a little more than just the nose sliding around.
Interviewer: Where did his name come from? Gosling: At the very beginning we just called him the agent character. Then this design started coming up and people started liking it, and just because of the way he looks, people started calling him Fang. Then one morning Joe Palrang walked in and said, "This character is a really nice guy. He's not Fang. Fang is a nasty name. Something just came to me in the night -- his name has to be Duke." A few people called him Fang for a little while longer, and Joe said, "No, his name is Duke." We used him in all kinds of places in the user interface [UI] -- it was a lot of fun. Then as we went on from that project, and we weren't using Duke as a part of the UI, people just liked Duke, and he became the project mascot. So he became the traditional center theme for the T-shirt designs and other stuff. Interviewer: What do you think of when you think of Duke? Gosling: A happy-go-lucky kind of guy, sort of like Winnie the Pooh. One of the problems with the business we're in is that it can easily drop into a pit of being very straitlaced and buttoned up. Somehow or other, the whole Java technology world has managed to avoid being deeply mired in that. It's more fun, more interesting, and more creative. Duke kind of fits that.
See Also
Bits and Bytes from Duke's
Birthday Cake
It's Duke's Birthday Too!
The Amazing Adventures
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James Gosling, creator of Java
technology, with Duke
Duke, with his own Duke logo plush toy,
