---
title: "Which came first, Instagram or JavaScript?"
description: "Instagram vs JavaScript: JavaScript came first, by 15 years — 1995 against 2010. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/instagram-vs-javascript/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, Instagram or JavaScript?

**Which came first, Instagram or JavaScript?: JavaScript**

1995 — 15 years before Instagram

JavaScript came first, by 15 years. Brendan Eich wrote it in ten days for Netscape Navigator.

## Side by side

|  | Instagram | JavaScript |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 2010 | 1995 |
| Date | 2010-10-06 | — |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | The app launched on iOS. | Brendan Eich wrote it in ten days for Netscape Navigator. |

## Instagram

Instagram launched in October 2010 as an iPhone-only app and took 25,000 users on its first day. Facebook bought it in April 2012 for about $1 billion when it had thirteen employees and no revenue. It is four years younger than Twitter and six years older than TikTok.

## 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, Instagram or JavaScript?

JavaScript, by 15 years — 1995 against 2010.

### When did Instagram start?

2010. The app launched on iOS.

### When did JavaScript start?

1995. Brendan Eich wrote it in ten days for Netscape Navigator.

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## Sources

- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (https://www.wikidata.org/) [CC0 1.0]