JavaScript is a popular scripting language used for various purposes from creating static websites to dynamic web applications, desktop and mobile native applications, this increasingly growing language has its amazing history of how it was evolved and was created in just 10 days, Yes 😀. Keep reading there is a lot more.
So it was all started in 1990 when the internet was prominent and newly launched as a place to share information across the globe. The companies wanted to share their ideas on the website which was built using HTML and CSS. To view the website they need a browser so Marc Andreessen created the first-ever browser named Mosaic in 1993. Mosaic got very famous, and the developers of Mosaic decided to build a company and commercialized it as Netscape.
Netscape created their browser and renamed Mosaic to Netscape Navigator. However, people have to pay to use the browser and to have access to the internet. Looking into these Microsoft also thought that the companies are making their browser why can't we, we have developers, money and so they created Internet Explorer which was free to use.
Netscape wants to stay in the market and to provide an intuitive, satisfying, and enjoyable user experience, they approached Sun Microsystems, that time Java was very famous and they thought of using Java on browser for the interactive environment because Java was using applet but things didn't work out with Java. Netscape decided to create a new language and they hired Brendan Eich who was a developer working on the Scheme programming language. Eich created a language in just 10 days and named it Mocha.
Initially, it has some features but some bugs too and while launching they named it LiveScript, it was new in the market and nobody was aware. Influenced by the famous language Java they named it JavaScript. Microsoft reverse engineered JavaScript and created a new language JScript. As it was free people started using JScript on Internet Explorer.
After this, Netscape approached ECMA International (Europian Computer Manufacturers Association) known for creating standards. Netscape wanted to make JavaScript standard to be used by everyone and for that ECMA created ECMA Script.
ECMA Script 1 was launched in 1997, after the 3 years of ECMAScript Netscape was sold to AOL(America Online) and before selling the company Netscape took the code of Netscape Navigator and made it open-source. The reincarnation of Netscape Navigator was Firefox. In 2008 Google made its own browser called Chrome and introduced the v8 engine. This v8 engine is used to run the Node.js applications.
ECMAScript 3.1 was launched and ECMA 4 was used by ActionScript by Macromedia. In 2009 ES5 was introduced and in 2015 ES6. Later on every year ECMA introduces new ECMA Script versions.
This way the whole history came out with amazing features and made JavaScript a popular language for almost all the platforms.