The History of JavaScript

To fully understand the history of JavaScript it is first necessary to go back to a time before Internet Explorer and Firefox dominated the web browser market, and before most of us even knew what a web browser was.

In January 1994 Jim Clark, the foundedr of Silicon Graphics, and Marc Andreeson, a graduate of the University of Illinois, met at Cafe Verona in Palo Alto, California to talk about starting a company. Whilst at the University of Illinois Marc had worked on Mosaic - one of the earliest web browsers - and the two soon decided to bring the internet and web browsing to the masses. Many sleepless nights and millions of lines of code later the Netscape browser took the internet by storm, and the company's subsequent stratospheric Initial Public Offering (IPO) triggered what would later be referred to as the dot-com boom.

Sadly neither Netscape nor Cafe Verona ultimately stood the test of time. Under attack from Microsoft, Netscape was purchased by AOL. Eventually the underlying Netscape browser was spun off into the open source Mozilla organization which later spawned the hugely successful Firefox browser. Cafe Verona also fell victim to the dot com implosion and went out of business a few years ago along with many Silicon Valley restuarants that relied on technology workers for their business.

Firefox is not the only legacy of Netscape Corporation however. It was at Netscape that the need for an alternative to the static nature of web pages was first identified.