https://medium.com/@anildash/what-if-javascript-wins-84898e5341a

What had often been a solitary pursuit, or one where collaboration happened with a defined set of colleagues within a company or open source project, burst open into a much more intrinsically social experience. Everything from how we share code to how we find answers to how we discover new technologies became far more linked to the attitudes and actions of other programmers.

In short, the people who make software got networked just like their computers had been in the preceding decades.