There were a few backend products that used server-side JS before Node.js

The Netscape Server had JS in 1998.

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/816-6411-10/contents.ht...

This was later but there was an entire server-side JS stack called Helma back in 2008: https://blog.astithas.com/2008/04/javascript-on-server-with-...

Think it was this (I am sure someone here will know better):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhino_(JavaScript_engine)

Albeit it was two years after the announcement.

Yeah, I remember people talking about Rhino when node.js originally came out, saying things like it's been tried before and wouldn't catch on.

Yes I heard the exact same.

Netscape had LiveWire, Microsoft had ASP, and Sybase had PowerDynamo. The first version of ASP was interpreted and supported pluggable scripting engines including JScript and VBScript. The Netscape and Sybase DynaScript interpreters ran on various flavors of Unix and RISC chips and were used much like PHP, Rails, and Django; web interface to relational databases.

Classic ASP had JScript, I once had the dubious pleasure of using JScript instead of VB on an ASP website.

Ugh, did some freelance work when I was younger in classic asp, got a project do work on an asp site and day one turned up it was all jscript! Nightmare!

It wasn't. They basically predicted Node.js 15 years before its inception.

EDIT: Okay, server-side JS indeed long predates Node.js. See below.

Netscape Enterprise Server executed server-side JavaScript ("SSJS")

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/816-5653-10/816-5653-10...

It was. I developed sites using Netscape Livewire, the server side JS in Netscape Enterprise Server. It was probably closer to ASP and PHP scripting, mixing HTML, client-side JS, and server-side JS in the same file.

It was also an option for IIS as well as vbscript in classic ASP pages.