- In this lesson, I'm going to tell you
about the history of JavaScript.
However, it's impossible to do that
without talking about the history of the internet.
In 1969, history was made when a computer
at UCLA sent a message to a computer
at Stanford Research Institute.
This pioneering network was called ARPANET.
And for the first time, computers in different locations
were able to communicate with each other.
By 1989 networks were spanning the globe.
However, there was no standardization of information.
Tim Berners-Lee a computer scientist at CERN
is quoted as saying in those days,
"There was different information on different computers,
"but you had to log on to different computers to get at it."
Also, sometimes you had to learn a different program
on each computer and often it was just easier
to go and ask people when they were having coffee.
To solve this, Tim wrote three technologies
that would become the backbone of the worldwide web:
HTML, uniform resource identifiers or URI, and HTTP.
Tim also wrote what would become the first web browser.
By 1995, the worldwide web was mainstream
and the first browser wars had begun.
Netscape Navigator had become
the most popular internet browser.
However, Microsoft was about to take advantage
of its dominance in the PC industry
and ship their own browser, Internet Explorer,
free of charge with all installations of Windows.
As the browser wars were heating up, Marc Andreessen,
the founder of Netscape, wanted to make browsers
more interactive and dynamic.
Brendan Ike was recruited by Netscape
to add a language to their Netscape Navigator browser.
The idea was to bring scheme,
a minimalist scripting library, to the browser.
This language would not be oriented
towards application developers and computer scientists,
but instead to hobbyists and designers.
Within 10 days, Ike had a working prototype,
which was incorporated into Netscape and JavaScript was born
Microsoft quickly followed suit and reverse engineered
their own version of JavaScript and named it Jscript.
Browser scripting languages had
become a key weapon in the browser wars.
Browser incompatibility, where websites
would work on one browser but not on another,
was becoming increasingly problematic,
as the intent of the worldwide web was
to standardize information.
In 1996, Netscape submitted JavaScript
to an organization called Ecma
for standardization to try to nip this in the bud.
And the first edition of the standards were adopted in 1997.
Technically, JavaScript, as we know it today,
is an implementation of the ECMAScript standards.
So, you will often hear references to ECMAScript
when reading about JavaScript.
One of the most significant updates
to the language was released in 2015
and is referred to as ES2015 or ES6.
JavaScript has evolved significantly
since its humble beginnings,
but many of the core design decisions
made during that 10 day period in 1995,
live on in the language that powers over 95%
of the world's websites today.