[dsego]

Node was created to make scripting fast servers easy. Nothing more, nothing less. Because JS (as implemented in the browser and known by many programmers) didn't carry the baggage of blocking IO calls, Ryan thought it would be a good language for an event-loop based server.

History of Node.js: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAc0vQCC6UQ

[catnaroek]

Fast Web servers. There is absolutely nothing there that I could use to make, say, a fast database server.

[dsego]

yes, fast web servers.