Java was created in the early 1990s by James Gosling and his team at Sun Microsystems. It was originally designed for interactive television but was found to be better suited for use on the internet. In 1995, Sun Microsystems released Java 1.0 and it became popular for developing web applications and applets due to its cross-platform capabilities. Today Java is widely used across many applications and devices due to its portability and ability to write code once and run anywhere. Some key aspects of Java include its object-oriented design, support for multithreading, and capacity for distributed applications through remote method invocation.