[dragonwriter]

> It wasn't until 2009 with the introduction of Node.js that JavaScript became a viable option for backend development.

JavaScript was used for backend development since the late 1990s via the Rhino engine (the backends wouldn't be pure JS generally but a mix of JS and Java; Rhino was a JS engine for the JVM with Java interop as a key feature.)

[hnlmorg]

Around that era, IIS also supported JS via ASP. Albeit typically people would write VBScript.