Jim Mitchell and Peter Madany at JavaSoft designed a new operating system, codenamed Kona, written completely in Java.
In March 1996, Tom Saulpaugh joined the now seven-person Kona team to design an input/output (I/O) architecture, having come from Apple as Macintosh system software engineer since June 1985 and co-architect of Copland.
[citation needed] JavaOS is based on a hardware architecture native microkernel, running on platforms including ARM, PowerPC, SPARC, StrongARM, and IA-32 (x86).
[4][page needed] JavaOS was designed to run on embedded systems and has applications in devices such as set-top boxes, computer networking infrastructure, and automated teller machines (ATMs).
[citation needed] JavaSoft granted licenses to more than 25 manufacturers, including Oracle, Acer, Xerox, Toshiba, and Nokia.