It's been 9 years since the first release of Jquery and since then it has come a long way. And in these years, jQuery has made an immense impact on website development. But it's always exciting to go back to history and find out how it started. Recently, John Resig (jQuery creator) annotated the first known copy of jQuery’s source code and shared his memories.

I've annotated the original 2006 version of jQuery and put it online: http://t.co/5sKTJ7HlhN Lots of memories and interesting hacks!

— John Resig (@jeresig) April 7, 2015

Below are some interesting unknown facts of jQuery, I came to know from reading Resig’s annotations.

• jQuery was originally called "JSelect" (for selecting elements out of the page, plus it started with JS, which was nice). However the domain name jselect.com wasn’t available, thus jQuery it was.
• There apparently was another project (a Java SQL library) named jQuery. But John Resig only found this out later after he was contacted by them about the name conflict!
• The public announcement of jQuery was in January 14, 2006 at BarCamp NewYork.
• jQuery was inspired by following open source projects.
  • Prototype JavaScript framework
  • moo.fx
  • XPath
  • Behaviour.js
• The first release of jQuery didn’t include any Ajax functionality! jQuery 1.0 had Ajax built-in natively.
• The first jQuery plugin was created by Michael Geary on January 25th, just 11 days after the first release of the library (even before this particular version of the file!): JSON for jQuery
• The original version of jQuery supported IE 5. But this was dropped very soon and ""upgraded"" to IE 6.
• There were no optional curly braces used in initial release of jQuery. You will find such code in first version of jQuery.
  

  if ( !b )
    for ( var j in a )
      this.style[j] = a[j];
  else
    this.style[a] = b;
  

• jQuery had proper method chaining from the very beginning. The chaining in jQuery has gone on to influence a large number of other libraries, even in other languages, which is pretty cool. It even included new conventions like .end() which allowed you to “pop” off of the chain stack.
• The first release also had a check to include jQuery library after the prototype library.
  

  setTimeout(function(){
     if ( typeof Prototype != "undefined" && $.g == null && $.clean == null )
       throw "Error: You are overwriting jQuery, please include jQuery last.";
   }, 1000);
  

You can find all the thoughts and memories around the release of the code at Genius put by John Resig. And you can also take a look at original version of the jQuery site

You may also like:

• jQuery library file size over the years
• jQuery code not working - A Daily Battle
• Common jQuery Mistakes
• 5 Reasons of jQuery - $ is not defined error

Feel free to contact me for any help related to jQuery, I will gladly help you.