---
title: "Which came first, JavaScript or Windows?"
description: "JavaScript vs Windows: Windows came first, by 10 years — 1985 against 1995. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/javascript-vs-windows/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, JavaScript or Windows?

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

1985 — 10 years before JavaScript

Windows came first, by 10 years. Microsoft shipped Windows 1.0.

## Side by side

|  | JavaScript | Windows |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1995 | 1985 |
| Date | — | 1985-11-20 |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | Brendan Eich wrote it in ten days for Netscape Navigator. | Microsoft shipped Windows 1.0. |

## 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.

## Windows

Windows 1.0 shipped in November 1985, twenty-two months after the Macintosh, and it was not an operating system — it was a graphical shell running on top of MS-DOS, and remained so until Windows NT in 1993 and the consumer transition with Windows XP in 2001. Version 1.0 could not even overlap windows: they tiled, because Apple's legal position on overlapping windows was unresolved.

## Common questions

### Which came first, JavaScript or Windows?

Windows, by 10 years — 1985 against 1995.

### When did JavaScript start?

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

### When did Windows start?

1985. Microsoft shipped Windows 1.0.

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## Sources

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