Honestly, I interpreted it as you saying they were kind of the same, glad we got it sorted and... that far back? I think that at the time javascript was still supposed to be a script language for the web to accompany java. Amazing how much it diverged from its original path.
And yeah, java at this point is pretty dead on the web for end users, the ones still using it are business with some service they haven't bothered to updated to something a bit better supported in current browsers.
And a lot of that business side stuff ends up broken as browser updates remove support for it.