Since when did the opportunity to import methods appear in java?

When I started to learn Java, I read that the form for using the import statement should be the following:

import package1 [.pack2]. (class name | *);

Those. either the whole package or a class can be imported, for example:

 import java.util.Date; import java.io.*; 

And today I first saw the following imports:

 import static org.apache.commons.lang.StringUtils.isNotBlank; 

Since when did the opportunity to import methods appear in java ? Was it always like this, or did it appear in one of the latest versions?