What are the historical computer science influences behind the Java programming language?

As far as the language goes, I'd say a lot of the influence comes from C++. I know Gosling said they were going for C++ programmers. So much of the original language was very recognizable from a C++ perspective. The main things that were missing were an explicit delete instruction, templates, and an iostreams library (it had its own I/O library). Given the history I've heard about the VM, it sounds like one source was Bob Barton's Burroughs B5000 system (source for this is Alan Kay), developed in the early 1960s. It was a system designed to run higher level languages. Some other accounts give credit to Strongtalk, which was a VM that was originally developed independently, intended to speed up Smalltalk. It was purchased by Sun Microsystems, and was made into the JVM, from whence Java got a runtime that ran bytecodes for objects, and did garbage collection.