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Which came first, Google or JavaScript?

Which came first, Google or JavaScript?
JavaScript
1995 — 3 years before Google

JavaScript came first, by 3 years. Brendan Eich wrote it in ten days for Netscape Navigator.

Side by side

Google JavaScript
Year 1998 1995
Date 1998-09-04
Category technology technology
What happened Google Inc. was incorporated in a garage in Menlo Park. Brendan Eich wrote it in ten days for Netscape Navigator.

Google

The date used here is the incorporation, 4 September 1998. Two others compete: the research project called BackRub began at Stanford in 1996, and the google.com domain was registered on 15 September 1997. Google itself has celebrated its birthday on four different September dates over the years, which is a fair indication that no single one is correct. It is younger than Amazon, eBay and Netflix.

JavaScript

JavaScript was written in about ten days in May 1995, shipped in Netscape Navigator 2.0 later that year, and was called LiveScript until December, when Netscape renamed it as part of a marketing deal with Sun. It has nothing to do with Java beyond some borrowed syntax. Standardisation as ECMAScript followed in 1997, and the language spent a decade being treated as a toy before it became the most widely deployed programming language in the world.

Common questions

Which came first, Google or JavaScript?
JavaScript, by 3 years — 1995 against 1998.
When did Google start?
1998. Google Inc. was incorporated in a garage in Menlo Park.
When did JavaScript start?
1995. Brendan Eich wrote it in ten days for Netscape Navigator.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Typical range compiled from manufacturer specifications — At One Place
  2. Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)

How these figures are compiled and checked