What people in tech said about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995

Time and time again JavaScript is crowned the most popular programming language in the World. Whether you agree with that or not, one thing’s for sure: It’s come a long way since its debut back in 1995.

Whilst Brendan Eich was hard at work creating the now much loved language twenty-five years ago, the O.J Simpson trial was well underway, Ross and Rachel weren’t quite on a break, yet — and Pixar’s Toy Story was mere weeks away from hitting theatres.

Oh, and Wikipedia informs me that 1995 also marks the year in which ISP’s like AOL and Prodigy offered up mainstream access to the World Wide Web for the first time (remember those CDs), releasing browsers that made ‘surfing the web’ easily accessible to the general public.

Sounds like it was the perfect time to be creating a programming language for browsers.

The birth of JavaScript in 4 slides: pic.twitter.com/i24LhfkgCY

— JavaScript Daily (@JavaScriptDaily) December 14, 2016

To mark the release of JavaScript a joint press release was issued from Netscape and Sun Microsystems on December 4, 1995.

This release claimed that JavaScript would be an “easy-to-use” scripting language designed for “creating live online applications”.

The press release then went on to share praise from then industry bigwigs.

Here’s what members of the tech industry (of ‘28 industry-leading companies’) had to say about little old JavaScript back in 1995. Some of the companies here are still going, others… not so much.

Note: Job titles are from the press release of the time

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