it's easier to remember that it originated from the Byte range, where all bytes could be kept in. Character didn't have negative values so it did [0-128) instead. Long and Short are the same as Byte.

Years before the autoboxing/Integer.valueOf() caching stuff (and before generics), (I) used to have IntegerProvider that did similar stuff to higher ranges. Personally, I have considered autoboxing on integers net-negative for Java