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Off topic a bit, but how long have the concepts of “full-stack”, “front-end”, and “back-end” been around? In the old days, when websites were just static html,

• black3r 6y ago
  I started coding web apps around 2012. Back then I didn't hear about backend/frontend and I've coded both backend and frontend JS scripts. But we did have specialists who created the static HTML & CSS templates. We just called them the CSS guys. I guess they were the pre-cursor to the front-end engineers. Then the JS frameworks started to rise and at first we used to spend a lot of time rewriting pure HTML to React, but gradually the CSS guys started to learn React/JSX and evolved into front-end engineers.
• GordonS 6y ago
  This is an interesting question. I started my professional development career 20 years ago, and there were pretty much 2 types of developer: those that did embedded development, and everyone else. JavaScript was even more of a shit-show than it is now (except that npm didn't exist), and browser support for, well anything, was terrible and inconsistent. Almost exclusively, server-side rendering was used (e.g. PHP, CGI, dotnet when it arrived a short time later). JavaScript was used sparingly to add interactively when needed. It was only really when npm and specialised front-end frameworks started to arrive that a distinction started to form. At the same time, browser compatibility started to improve, and JavaScript, HTML and CSS finally started to evolve and improve. With those additional capabilities came more complexity, and so front-end has gradually became a more specialised field.