JavaScript turns 30

The JavaScript programming language was released 30 years ago this week. So gather ‘round the campfire, youngsters, while grandpa tells you a story of the Old West.

You know that the World Wide Web changed everything, but you may not know that the original language (HTML) had no provision for any logic at all. It was simply for displaying static pages. Any actual programming logic had to happen on the server which might be thousands of miles away. So in those days we spent a lot of time clicking “submit” and then waiting….and waiting….and waiting…

In April of 1994, Netscape was founded by Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark (former professor at Stanford) to create and sell a new, improved web browser. They hired a young graduate of Santa Clara University, Brendan Eich, and gave him a tall order: develop a programming language that would run within the Netscape browser (“client-side”) instead of needing to run on the server (“server-side”).

They told him they wanted it to be a “language for the masses” (a programming language that even web designers could easily pick up) but that it should have syntax similar to Java (a sophisticated server-side language used by hardcore software engineers).

Quite an assignment. But young Brendan Eich completed the initial project in ten days. JavaScript was released to the world along with the Netscape 2.0 browser, in December of 1995.

Now this, boys and girls, is where things got squirrely. Microsoft released their own browser, Internet Explorer, that same year. And the following year they released “JScript”, a complete rip-off of Netscape’s Javascript with the name changed to avoid legal problems.

Now here’s the rub: Netscape was selling their browser for $49, while Microsoft gave their Internet Explorer browser away for free with every copy of Microsoft Windows.

If your entire company is built around selling a product that a competitor is suddenly giving away for free, you have a problem. Netscape went from having a 95% browser market share in 1995 to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer having that same 95% just three years later. A landmark antitrust suit was filed, but it was too late to save the company. Netscape as a company was wound-down and what was left was acquired by AOL.

But — very importantly — Netscape team members open-sourced most of their technologies and created the Mozilla Foundation as a nonprofit that would maintain the free software and promote standards.

Today, Brendan Eich’s JavaScript is used by 99% of all websites on earth. He created it in ten days, and thirty years later it is free and still powering nearly everything we touch online.

There’s your tribal history for the day.