Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

What stands out to me is how much more foresight they had than I'd thought about the ways JS would be used: > With JavaScript, an HTML page might contain an intelligent form that performs loan payment or currency exchange calculations right on the client in response to user input. A multimedia weather forecast applet written in Java can be scripted by JavaScript to display appropriate images and sounds based on the current weather readings in a region. A server-side…

Netscape and Sun plan to propose JavaScript to the W3 Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as an open Internet scripting language standard. JavaScript will be an open, freely licensed proposed standard available to the entire Internet community. Existing Sun Java licensees will receive a license to JavaScript. In addition, Sun and Netscape intend to make a source code reference implementation of JavaScript available for royalty-free licensing, further encouraging its adoption as a…

Interesting how they pitched it "as a complement to Java". Seems like everyone since then has been trying to emphasize how it's not.

And it was supposed to be called either Oak or LiveScript until Netscape decided that Java was the be-all-end-all and this new scripting language just HAD to be called JavaScript. Too bad too, because the language that was originally proposed was dialect of Scheme (or was it Scheme itself?). So many what-ifs loaded into the adoption of JavaScript had it gone another direction.