Author: Richard MacManus

Richard MacManus is a pioneering tech blogger and author. He was the founder and Editor-in-Chief of ReadWriteWeb (RWW) from 2003-2012. RWW was ranked among the top 10 blogs in the world, according to Technorati. It was syndicated by The New York Times and eventually acquired by SAY Media.

Web: ricmac.org

January 13, 2021 by Richard MacManus 2 comments

1968: The Mother of All Demos

It’s Monday the 9th of December, 1968, and Douglas Engelbart, a 43 year old Silicon Valley engineer, is about to give the biggest presentation of his career. He’s going to showcase the world’s first personal, networked, computer — as a live demo. It’s the computing equivalent of a high-wire trapeze act with no net.

January 5, 2021 by Richard MacManus

1996: JavaScript Annoyances and Meeting the DOM

For all of the technical wizardry in Netscape Navigator 2.0, when it was first released JavaScript was put to use in fairly trivial ways — scrolling text, silly animations, tricks with colors (fading, rainbow effects, and so on). Inventor Brendan Eich called these initial use cases “annoyances.” But there was also an underlying power, especially with the beginnings of the DOM.

December 22, 2020 by Richard MacManus 1 comment

1995: The Birth of JavaScript

JavaScript was invented in a two-week flurry in May 1995 by Brendan Eich, at the time a newly hired developer at browser company Netscape. The project was initiated by Netscape because of a desire to extend the early Web beyond the limits of HTML. In particular, Netscape wanted to add interactivity to websites. JavaScript ended up being the solution and this post explores how that came to be.