Apocalypse 2.0 - the day the web broke
On February 16th, 2005, Jesse James Garrett coined the term Ajax in an article titled "Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications". Days before that, on February 8th, the Google Blog announced something called Google Maps. Ajax was born and the web hasn't been the same since. The combination of JavaScript, DHTML and CSS seemed to breathe a new kind of life into the web. All of a sudden you could program a series of hacks and your web page didn't behave like a web page before. All that time you spent learning JavaScript? With Ajax, you were in demand again! People started saying things like "JavaScript Engineer" with a straight face.