Damn your loading gif, I thought that dev.to crashed, it kept loading.
As for the history, I think the first ones were 2006 Yahoo YUI Compressor and Google... I forgot its name, that minified multiple JS/CSS files. This cover many years of history before nodeJS.
Also, from my experience, JS/CSS files were never the problem, the Flash scripts, images and number of requests were the bottle necks.
We also had to use gaming techniques to group multiple images into 1 (maps and atlases), to make 1 request and save some kb (because they share the same colors).
Another limitation was the number of parallel requests, which we bypass sometime by using different subdomains for static files.
Damn your loading gif, I thought that dev.to crashed, it kept loading.
As for the history, I think the first ones were 2006 Yahoo YUI Compressor and Google... I forgot its name, that minified multiple JS/CSS files. This cover many years of history before nodeJS.
Also, from my experience, JS/CSS files were never the problem, the Flash scripts, images and number of requests were the bottle necks.
We also had to use gaming techniques to group multiple images into 1 (maps and atlases), to make 1 request and save some kb (because they share the same colors).
Another limitation was the number of parallel requests, which we bypass sometime by using different subdomains for static files.
Good point! YUI Compressor and the Closure compiler were huge steps forward. I never got either to work in my projects, so they slipped my mind.