People were definitely experimenting with it before that. Developers were mostly using it to load direct server-side snippets of HTML, dynamically. It took the

People were definitely experimenting with it before that. Developers were mostly using it to load direct server-side snippets of HTML, dynamically. It took the evolution of SOAP and (especially) JSON/RESTful APIs for it to start seeing mass adoption as the combined technology of "AJAX". Prototype.js and jQuery had a big hand in the latter.