Comment by zkmon

Applets (Java 1.1 - that's where I started),

Servlets (Together with MS ASP, JSP/Servlets have fuelled the e-commerce websites)

I think Java dominated the scene mostly because of its enterprise features (Java EE) and the supporting frameworks (Spring etc) and applications (Tomcat, Websphere, Weblogic etc) and support from Open source (Apache, IBM)