Javascript history

1986 - Self and Mocha

• in 1986 David Ungar and Randall B. Smith developed Self at Xerox PARC
• in 1995 Brendan Eich was hired to develops Mocha for Netscape. He was inspired by Java, Scheme and Self

1991-1996 - Web 1.0

• 1991: Web 1.0
• 1995: Microsoft releases MSIE 1.0 with VBScript
• 1995: Sun buys Netscape and renames Mocha/LiveScript to Javascript for making it the perfect companion for Sun's Java
• 1996: Microsoft releases MSIE 3.0 with JScript.NET
• 1996: Netscape's JavaScript engine SpiderMonkey
• 1996: Javascript starts as ECMA (since 1961) standard

1997-1999 - ECMAScript

• 1997: Release of ES1
• 1998: Release of ES2
• 1999: Release of ES3

2000-2008 - Abandoned ES4

• 2000: Start of ES4 (never released)
• 2000: Adobe releases Flash 5 with ActionScript (=ES4 draft)
• 2000: Open extension JSON emerges as a subset of JavaScript
• 2004: Web 2.0
• 2004: Release of E4X extension (ECMAScript for XML)
• 2005: AJAX and XMLHttpRequest emerge
• 2006: Release of jQuery
• 2007: Microsoft releases SilverLight
• 2008: Microsoft kills 8 years of ES4

2008-2009 - ES3.1 and ES5

• 2008: Start development of ES3.1 (later named ES5)
• 2008: Google releases Chrome and V8 JavaScript engine
• 2009: Release of ES3.1/ES5

2009 - NodeJs

• Google announces Golang
• Release of NodeJs (using V8 JavaScript engine)
• Mozilla releases ServerJS (later renamed to CommonJS)

2010 - NPM, Express and AngularJs

• Release of NPM
• Release of Express
• Release of AngularJs

2011 - EmberJs

• Release of NPM v1
• Release of EmberJs

2012 - Typescript and Golang

• Microsoft releases Typescript v0.8
• Google releases Golang

2013 - React

• Release of Browserify
• Release of ReactJs

2014 - VueJs, Babel and Webpack

• Release of VueJs
• Release of Babel
• Release of Webpack
• Release of Google Traceur compiler v0.0.10
• NPM grows to over 50.000 modules - 2015: Release of ES6/ES2015, with all draft ES4 features except types (15 years after ES4 draft)

2015 - RollupJs

• Release of RollupJs v0.3.1
• Release of NodeJs v4 (v1/v2/v3 do not exist)

2016 - Yarn

• Microsoft releases Typescript v2
• ES2016 (async/await)
• Release of Yarn with workspaces
• Release of Node v6

2017 - Parcel

• ES2017 (Object.values/Object.entries)
• HTTP/2
• Chrome 61 with native support for JavaScript modules
• Release of Parcel

2018 - Deno announced

• Release of Node v8
• ES2018 (Promise.finally)
• Release of RollupJs v1.0
• Release of Node v10/v11 (experimental ESM)
• Microsoft releases Typescript v3
• Ryan Dahl announces Deno

2019 - Experimental ESM in NodeJs

• ES2019 (Array.sort/Array.flat/Array.flatMap)
• Release of Node v12/v13 (experimental ESM)
• Release of Lerna v1.0 for handling monorepo's

2020 - Deno v1

• ES2020
• Release of Node v14/v15 (stable ESM in v15)
• Microsoft releases Typescript v4
• Deno v1

2021 - NPM v7 with workspaces

• NPM v7 with workspaces