By the start of 1997, JavaScript had become a regular topic for tech reference websites and books. Nick Heinle was perhaps the epitome of this, as he began 1997 with a column on WebReference.com called JavaScript Tip of the Week, released an O’Reilly book in August 1997 entitled Designing with Javascript: Creating...

If CGI scripts were the start of interactive programming on the web, then PHP was the natural next step — at least on the server-side. Just a month after Brendan Eich created the JavaScript scripting language at Netscape, an independent developer from Canada named Rasmus Lerdorf released the first version of a...

CGI logo created by the NCSA at the University of Illinois; via Wikipedia. A couple of years before JavaScript was invented, a specification called the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) enabled an early form of interactivity for web pages. But whereas JavaScript performed interactive tasks inside the browser (that is,...

After Microsoft upped the ante in the browser market in 1996 by integrating Internet Explorer 3.0 into Windows, Netscape began the new year with a renewed focus on the open web. Co-founder and CTO Marc Andreessen, along with the Netscape product team, introduced a new strategy called “crossware”: “Crossware...

Bill Gates at PDC 1996. In March 1996, at Microsoft’s annual Professional Developers Conference (PDC), Bill Gates announced a set of internet technologies called ActiveX. “Part of the unique thing that Microsoft is doing,” he said regarding Microsoft’s approach to the Internet, “[…] is a strong level of integration...

It’s the evening of Friday the 1st of December, 2000. Nearly 32 years to the day when Douglas Engelbart presented the mother of all demos. Now 75 years old, Engelbart is at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. It’s a black-tie event, which is unusual for Engelbart to attend. He’s dressed awkwardly in a...

Marc Andreessen at Netscape's second Internet Developer Conference, October 1996. Netscape launched interactivity into web pages in 1995, via a new scripting language called JavaScript. This heralded the start of the multimedia era of web browsers. In March 1996, Netscape debuted its Navigator 2.0 browser, which...

It’s Monday the 9th of December, 1968, and Douglas Engelbart, a 43 year old Silicon Valley engineer, is about to give the biggest presentation of his career. He’s at the Fall Joint Computer Conference, in downtown San Francisco, and he’s feeling anxious. Not so much about the crowd; by now Engelbart is used to...

“Hi, I’m Brendan Eich, welcome to my homepage.” Via Wayback Machine. The Netscape Navigator 2.0 browser was finally released in March 1996, almost a year after Brendan Eich joined Netscape with the express purpose of creating a scripting language for the web. He’d developed the prototype of JavaScript over a ten day...

Netscape Navigator 2, which featured the first version of JavaScript; image via Wikimedia. JavaScript was invented in a two-week flurry in May 1995 by Brendan Eich, at the time a newly hired developer at browser company Netscape. The project was initiated by Netscape because of a desire to extend the early Web...

The writer and cultural critic Clive James died last November, at the age of 80. I mainly knew of James from his 1980s and 1990s tv shows, such as Clive James on Television and Saturday Night Clive. I’d also read some of his essays and books before. He was one of those humorous and wise critics – not just about...

“It feels like the internet’s impact on culture is just beginning. A world in which culture is based on the internet, which is what I think is happening, is just the very start. Right, ’cause it had to get universal before it could set the culture.” Those words were spoken by Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape...