The latest ACM Queue features "A Conversation with James Gosling". In it, Gosling talks about writing his first interpreter as a highschool kid, and that he's been reusing the same idea ever since (including for Java).

Nice tidbit: the interviewer asked about C# (Microsoft's answer to, and complete rip-off of, Java), which drew out this amusing comment about Microsoft's approach toward security:

Microsoft is getting hammered over and over and over again about [security], and has been for years, and the company says a lot of good words, but it doesn't actually seem to do anything really significant [about the problem]. It issues a lot of patches. It doesn't actually think about things from the ground up.

Security is one of these things that you don't add by painting it on afterward. Like our metaphor earlier about buildings, if you're going to build an earthquake-safe building, you have to do it from the foundation up. You can't just build any old sloppy building and then apply earthquake safety paint to it.