Something that was created decades ago , who would have thought that Javascript (which was simply meant to be a scripting language for the web browser) would become synonymous to Web developement.
Let us go back in time to know how we are where we are today.

1. The year was 1993 : NCSA (National Center for Supercomputer Applications ) released NCSA Mosaic (first ever graphical web browser).

2. The year was 1994 :A company by the name of Mosaic Communications was founded in Mountainview California and they recruited the authors of NCSA Mosaic to rewrite the exact same product and call it Mosaic Netscape.

Mosaic Netscape turned out to be a huge success and possessed 75% of the market share >>>fast forward>>> Due to some legal issues name was changed from Mosaic Netscape >>> Netscape Navigator.
Company name also changed from Mosaic Communications to Netscape Communications .
To engage more and more people with the Netscape Navigator browser , the founder was looking for a programming language for this browser.

3. The year was 1995 : Brendan Eich who was later termed as the father of Javascript was given the task to develope and design a programming language for this browser .

He came up with a prototype within 10 days and called it Mocha.
Mocha was later given the name Livescript which was upgraded for the beta version 2.0 of Netscape Navigator.
Finally the name was changed to Javascript for the beta version 3.0 of the netscape navigator.

Why the name Javascript?

Eventhough the language was nowhere close to java in its design and core functionality, it was intentionally given the name the reason being java was very popular and in high demand back then.
It was a strategic move to name it so as to lure java developer community (Sun Microsystems) to come work and develope the web browser together .
Looking at netscape Microsoft released its own version of scripting language VBscript and Jscript for Internet Explorer.
Jscript is often termed as the revsersed engineering version of Javascript and was created for Internet Explorer 3

Most important time:

4. The year was 1996 : Netscape communications submitted javascript to ECMA international standards organization to advance the standardization of javascript .