Free Knowledge Culture Calendar/June 27

Today in 1997 ECMAScript was standardized. It brought a unifying standard after Borland and Microsoft had already forked off their own dialects of the Web scripting language JavaScript, which Netscape had introduced in 1995. It became the most widely used programming language and the Web the most common computing platform. After overcoming another divide, namely Microsoft’s JScript, the rise of Ajax web applications gave a big boost in popularity starting in 2005, and finally the immensely popular Node.js runtime brought substantial usage outside of web browsers.