[thomasfl]

Yes, the history of web development is easily forgotten. JavaScript was basically considered pretty useless by many web developers before Prototype and jQuery came and provided a compatibility layer that fixed browser differences. It was not worth the effort to add javascript to your html because no one had any confidence that it would work in all types of browsers. It's less than 10 years ago.

[Spearchucker]

In South Africa JavaScript took off like crazy in the late 90's. Netscape was still big then. Here's a thing I built in 1997 - it was a side project I used to teach myself JavaScript -

http://www.wittenburg.co.uk/mobile/

Choose "Handsets" from the top menu, and play around with manufacturers and network types to narrow the list of cellphones