At Austin, Texas, the site of Schlumberger’s general computer system research and development facility, based on a proposal by the Paris-based smart card marketing group, the chairman of Schlumberger elected to create a team charged with creating a new smart card system. Thanks to the center’s privileged position as the main system development group within the global corporate structure, the team could draw on some of the senior and prominent computer scientists gathered in Austin in 1996.

This assembled team knew next to nothing about smart cards, but they had considerable experience in operating systems. Moreover, they were very well versed in the concepts, mechanisms and history of computing in general, and computing in the face of highly constrained resources specifically. Since the specific development effort dealt with operating systems, it seemed clear (as it would to virtually anyone in the computer world) that if it was a success, then the long-term competitive threat would likely come from Microsoft, not the other smart card companies. It was also clear that in this realm, Schlumberger, for all its gravitas in the oil patch, had no chance to combat such a threat alone. The food chain danger in this case was to follow the commoditization fate of computer manufacturers, or rather, a much worse fate, since cards don’t have the myriad of peripherals which allow computer manufacturers to innovate in various ways. From the business perspective, a considerable part of smart card value comes from operating systems and applications. Leaving that to others was unthinkable.

Therefore, it was clear to the team that they’d better design an operating system that other card manufacturers would agree with, so that a level field would be created allowing them to compete for excellence. The system requirement was provision of a secure smart card facility that would allow faster deployment of new applications, and specifically the deployment of these applications after the smart card was already in the hands of the end consumer. The concept was termed post-issuance programmability. At the time, there was but one obvious choice. This was to make use of Java from Sun Microsystems. Unfortunately, at the time Java was relatively big and smart cards were absolutely little. The only way to shoehorn Java into a smart card at the time was to lop off a couple of toes; that is, to subset Java.

So, in June 1996, the Schlumberger team went to Cupertino, California to propose to Sun to subset Java in order to make it run on a smart card. Sun was less than enthusiastic, as was reasonably to be expected. The credo of Java was “Write once, run everywhere!” If the language were subsetted, a smart card Java application could be made to run on a mainframe, but a mainframe Java application probably couldn’t be made to run on a smart card. While philosophically this is a compelling argument, from a business standpoint it rather missed the point. Smart cards offered a potential market of billions of units. That is also quite compelling, even in the world of the Internet. So, in September, the team managed to go visit Sun again, this time through new contacts within Sun’s more business-computing oriented groups. The idea of subsetting Java was then more amicably received by Sun, even by the spiritual leaders of the Java effort within Sun. In fact, the subsetting had already been done by the Schlumberger team, which was able to present a working Java subset implementation on a smart card as a fait accompli.

Once Sun accepted the philosophical concept, the next step was to insure common acceptance of a new operating system standard within the smart card industry. Java is an interesting thing from a standards perspective, because it is the intellectual property of Sun Microsystems. In order to attract a sufficient user community, all of whom were skeptical of adopting single source (essentially proprietary) mechanisms, Sun adopted a moderately open process for the care and feeding of the Java Specifications. The smart card industry, being similarly skeptical of the single source nature of Java, chose to create a consortium called the Java Card Forum to act as

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