JDK Versions

1. JDK Alpha and Beta (1995): Sun announced Java in September 23, 1995.
2. JDK 1.0 (January 23, 1996): Originally called Oak (named after the oak tree outside James Gosling's office). Renamed to Java 1 in JDK 1.0.2.
3. JDK 1.1 (February 19, 1997): Introduced AWT event model, inner class, JavaBean, JDBC, and RMI.
4. J2SE 1.2 (codename Playground) (December 8, 1998): Re-branded as "Java 2" and renamed JDK to J2SE (Java 2 Standard Edition). Also released J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) and J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition). Included JFC (Java Foundation Classes - Swing, Accessibility API, Java 2D, Pluggable Look and Feel and Drag and Drop). Introduced Collection Framework and JIT compiler.
5. J2SE 1.3 (codename Kestrel) (May 8, 2000): Introduced Hotspot JVM.
6. J2SE 1.4 (codename Merlin) (February 6, 2002): Introduced assert, non-blocking IO (nio), logging API, image IO, Java webstart, regular expression support.
7. J2SE 5.0 (codename Tiger) (September 30, 2004): Officially called 5.0 instead of 1.5. Introduced generics, autoboxing/unboxing, annotation, enum, varargs, for-each loop, static import.
8. Java SE 6 (codename Mustang) (December 11, 2006): Renamed J2SE to Java SE (Java Standard Edition).
9. Java SE 7 (codename Dolphin) (July 28, 2011): First version after Oracle purchased Sun (called Oracle JDK).
10. Java SE 8 (March 18, 2014): included support for Lambda expressions, default methods, and JavaScript runtime.