History of Javascript

By briangainer

  • Birth of JavaScript

    JavaScript was created by Brendan Eich, then working at Netscape. The original name of JavaScript was Mocha, a name chosen by Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape.

  • 1st Name Change

    From Mocha, the name was changed to LiveScript.

  • 2nd (and Last) Name Change

    Upon receiving a trademark license from Sun Micro-systems, the name JavaScript was adopted.

  • Picking up in Popularity

    A Netscape Press Release puts the number of JavaScript pages at 300,000.

  • Making Standard Specifications

    JavaScript was taken to ECMA to carve out a standard specification, which other browser vendors could then implement based on the work done at Netscape. ECMAScript is the name of the official standard, with JavaScript being the most well known of the implementations.

  • Release of ECMAScript 2

    ECMAScript 2 brought in the ISO/IEC 16262 international standards, the baseline for modern day JavaScript.

  • ECMAScript 3

    Release of ECMAScript 3 in December 1999.

  • ECMAScript for XML

    Brendan Eich and Mozilla rejoined Ecma International as a not-for-profit member and work started on ECMAScript for XML (E4X), the ECMA-357 standard.

  • Node.js

    Node.js was introduced in 2009. It is an open-source, cross-platform JavaScript run-time environment for executing JavaScript code server-side.