Java was originally developed at Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s as an object-oriented programming language intended for use in embedded systems. It was designed to be portable, meaning that code written in Java could run on any platform with a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). The JVM allows Java code to execute in a platform-independent manner, as it compiles Java code to bytecode that is then interpreted by the JVM rather than generating native machine code. This makes Java well-suited for distributed computing over networks.