In January 2003, Bill Bumgarner had published a discussion thread from former NeXT engineers debating 0xCAFEBABE and 0xFEEDFACE. A Unix magic-number file entry credited the choice to a duo: Larry Schwimmer and Mike DeMoney, implying DeMoney had smuggled the value from NeXT to Sun's FirstPerson project.

DeMoney corrected the record. He never spoke with Schwimmer. Java's value was already baked when he arrived at FirstPerson. The overlap was pure chance — hexadecimal offers only a handful of pronounceable words. He may have picked the NeXT Mach-O values during his kernel work, but that's separate.

A barista named Cafe babe at Pete's Coffee in Palo Alto got mentioned next. The claim stuck it to the Oak and Green Project era, crediting James Gosling and coffee-shop regulars.

Gosling supplied what Bumgarner called the definitive account. The team lunched at St Michael's Alley, supposedly a Grateful Dead haunt before the band made it. After Jerry's death, locals put up a small shrine. Developers nicknamed it Cafe Dead. When Gosling needed magic numbers for a persistent-object format and class files, he chose CAFEDEAD for objects, then hunted for a four-hex-character suffix after CAFE. BABE fit. Objects went away; RMI took over. The update corrected Schwimmer's first name (Bumgarner had typed David) and noted he later joined Google.