Close, but not fully. Volatile enforces using an assembly read instruction (does not use a register cached value), but no memory barriers. In ye (really) olden days that seemed enough, but then you know, backwards compatibility...
Well, that's what Java's "volatile" actually enforces.
C's "volatile" isn't enough, but more recent C compilers have atomics and memory models.
The memory-model problem wasn't solved until the 00s (that late!!!) when multicore CPUs became more commonplace. Java, C++11, and other language / language updates after that point quickly adopted memory models. And the rest is history.
