Nobody at the time gave a hoot about "unsafe memory accesses". That is a wholly recent conceit. Nobody then cared about security. Sendmail was how e-mail was delivered, and was, believe it, widely admired.
Java was just enough like the C++ of 1990 to compete, but with garbage collection and a big library, and without confusing pointers, so lower-skilled programmers could use it. That is all. Computers were literally thousands of times slower than today. Java was considered just barely fast enough.
But without freeing programmers from the Microsoft frameworks treadmill, it would have sunk without a trace.
Java was just enough like the C++ of 1990 to compete, but with garbage collection and a big library, and without confusing pointers, so lower-skilled programmers could use it. That is all. Computers were literally thousands of times slower than today. Java was considered just barely fast enough.
But without freeing programmers from the Microsoft frameworks treadmill, it would have sunk without a trace.