It's true that the server is where Java has been most successful, by a large margin.
But it was never Java's "original premise", which is what the comment you are replying to was about. According to their (very heavy-handed) marketing at the time, Java was supposed to be for native desktop applications and for "applets". But yeah, in the many years it took for those promises to truly become hollow, Java carved out a surprisingly robust niche for itself on the enterprise server.
Also, I am skeptical of this last sentence of yours. The thing that resisted the Windows server onslaught, broadly, was the wide range of free-as-in-speech-and-as-in-beer backend technologies, like Perl, PHP, Python, Postgres, and some other things that start with "P", as well as, yeah, Java. Java played a role, but it was just one of many.
Java was created from the beginning for embedded devices. Most people don't realize that is has been there since the beginning on each Nokia 3310 device all the way up to most Android apps on the newest smartphones.
On the desktop we had Swing which was OKish to build GUI apps (albeit still underneath Borland) and then totally lost sight of desktop with JavaFX that was created without hearing the community and then abandoned, also refusing to improve Swing. Quite a pity.
> Java was created from the beginning for embedded devices
This is technically not true, as far as I know. That whole idea of Java ME, different "profiles", all that stuff happens in roughly 1998, which is definitely not "from the beginning". Though, looking it up now, apparently the Java Card stuff gets started a little earlier than that (which I didn't know/notice at the time, probably because it apparently wasn't initially a Sun initiative and so I'm guessing Sun's self-promotion didn't mention it in the really early days).
But depending on what your point is, maybe my first paragraph is merely a technical quibble, not a substantive disagreement. Maybe your point is that Java's success has been, in part, due to its ubiquity in small-but-not-tiny devices like "feature phones". Fair enough, I guess, and if that's your point then it doesn't really matter if it was truly "from the beginning", or just "one of the earliest pivots" (which I think is more accurate).
Myself, my point is that DrScientist's reply to quickthrower2 is, as a reply, just straight-up wrong wrong wrong. Java's original premise was twofold: web applets, and desktop apps that didn't need to be maximum performance (note that Swing was also not the original Java GUI toolkit, I've forgotten the name of the thing that preceded it, Swing was certainly much better). Building servers was NOT part of Java's original premise. And quickthrower2 is right: the web ate that original premise. Java had to pivot to live, and did.
I'm getting too pedantic here, but the historical revisionism is winding me up.
Other people pointed relevant pages where you can read: "In 1985, Sun Microsystems was attempting to develop a new technology for programming next generation smart appliances, which Sun expected to be a major new opportunity"
This was common knowledge on that decade.
From memory don't recall Java being focused on server-side much later until the 2000s with Tomcat and JBoss making a lot of stride, can't say I was fan of either. Maybe that is the time when your person first saw Java trying to compete for whatever space was left of web to take. I'm failing to have the impression AWT was ever relevant, that's why it wasn't even mentioned as everyone seemed to be using only Swing except for some god-awful projects in the gov domain.
For embedded developers (phones, smartcards, electronic devices, ...) it was well-established since the early days because IMHO was _easy_ to use/deploy/maintain by comparison to other options. Even looking at the options available today, it is still on the top albeit C++ making quite a fantastic comeback with Arduino albeit continuing to be a pain in the rear to debug.
But it was never Java's "original premise", which is what the comment you are replying to was about. According to their (very heavy-handed) marketing at the time, Java was supposed to be for native desktop applications and for "applets". But yeah, in the many years it took for those promises to truly become hollow, Java carved out a surprisingly robust niche for itself on the enterprise server.
Also, I am skeptical of this last sentence of yours. The thing that resisted the Windows server onslaught, broadly, was the wide range of free-as-in-speech-and-as-in-beer backend technologies, like Perl, PHP, Python, Postgres, and some other things that start with "P", as well as, yeah, Java. Java played a role, but it was just one of many.