Let's discuss the history of AngularJS before introducing you to Angular. It all started with improving the development process of client-side web. As part of the improvement, Microsoft introduced the XML HTTP request object to retrieve data from the server. As the advanced JavaScript libraries such as jQuery and Prototype were introduced, developers started using Ajax to asynchronously request data from the server. These libraries were extensively used to manipulate the DOM and bind data to a UI in the late 90s.

Ajax is the short form of asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Ajax can enable web applications to send data to or retrieve data from a server asynchronously without interfering with the display and behavior of the page. Ajax allows web applications to change content dynamically, without reloading the full page by decoupling the data interchange layer from the presentation layer.

In late 2010, two JavaScript MVC frameworks were introduced: backbone and knockout. Backbone provided a complete Model-View-Controller experience, whereas knockout mainly focused on binding using the MVVM pattern. With the release of these frameworks, people started believing in the power of client-side MVC frameworks.