I remember the AJAX evolution and the RIA craze pretty fondly myself:
A JavaScript API called XMLHttpRequest came along, originally only supported in a handful of browsers. This let a web page make a request to another URL and do something with the data — quite a revolutionary concept at the time.
XMLHttpRequest didn’t get a lot of adoption until the idea got a better name: Ajax.Jesse James Garrett’s famous blog post was successful because it (1) let people know that this technique existed and (2) gave it a much easier-to-pronounce name.
Source: The history of ‘this website is well-crafted’ hints | Holovaty.com
