Birth of JavaScript
Brendan Eich
In the year of 1985, A kid named Brendan Eich graduated from Illinois college. He got a job at Silicon Graphics Intentional which invents in GPU. He worked there for seven years until the browser world started.
Netscape
In the year 1994, Marc and Jim came together to start their company Netscape. First, they named it MCom but renamed the company to Netscape after Mosaic filed a legal action against the name. Netscape was the first browser. In the initial days, Netscape used java plugins to build the browsers. They hired Brendan to implements browsers scheme.
Use of java in the browser was becoming a curse for Netscape as Sun, the company which owns Java rights was pressuring them in different ways possible.
LiveScript
One day in a team meeting, Brendan suggested on creating a language which could
1. reduce complexity of broswer
2. Simplify the script of browser
Netscape team liked his suggestion and asked him to show some sample results.
Brendan worked for ten days and ten nights by fueling and refueling himself on coffee. His love for coffee made him name the project as Mocha. Yes, the first name of JavaScript was Mocha. He showcased his work to Netscape and the team loved the outcome. Although, they didn’t like the name, Mocha and suggested to rename it as “LiveScript”. The name LiveScript comes from a server named Live.
JavaScript
When Sun came to know that Netscape had created a new language LiveScript. They rushed to Netscape office and offered them to use the first name as Java for LiveScript. To convince Netscape, they said, Java has a popular name in the market which will boost LiveScript ’s fame.
Netscape accepted the offer and named it JavaScript.
Microsoft
Microsoft had an eye on all activities of Netscape. As they were a competitor in the browser world. Microsoft created a new language and named it JScript taking all the good from JavaScript. Netscape got a hint of the Microsoft’s activities, so without further ado, They rushed to meet ECMA to save JavaScript.
ECMA
ECMA(European Computer Manufacturers Association) agreed to help JavaScript in standardising. ECMA had a language specification named ECMAScript which javaScript use it as an API.
Browser war & Birth of Mozilla
As Microsoft, jumped into the browser war with Netscape with JScript. To fight back Internet Explorer, Netscape created a Mozilla browser. Yet, Internet Explorer 4 changed the tide of browser war as it got integrated with all Microsoft Operating Systems. It had made IE the most used browser. Nevertheless, this didn’t make the Mozilla team lose their faith and they kept improving Mozilla.
MS and Netscape team came together to an understanding, to use the standard ECMAScript API to make the application cross-browser independent. A JavaScript committee was set up and named TC39 (Technical committees). This committee came together to discuss the future of JavaScript.
This is story of birth of JavaScript, Mozilla and Internet Explorer.
Special thanks to Vignesh Viswanathan for course audit !!
