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Event driven programming has been the norm for GUI systems as long as they have existed. I think that the heritage came from Simula in the 1960s, which influenced SmallTalk in the 1970s, which was a major influence for most object-oriented languages and GUI systems since then.

Erlang and JavaScript come much much later on in the evolution of programming languages; Erlang originated in the late 1980s, and JavaScript in 1995.

That makes sense. I’ve bren dabbling in GUI apps with C# and I see some of that though I don’t quite understand it all yet.

Tcl had event-driven programming much longer than JavaScript (and much more pleasant).

I think Erlang may have been the first production platform to do it, but I'm not sure about that. I suspect the idea has been around for a very long time, and there's probably some obscure language out there from 1960s IBM mainframes that came up with the idea.

Visual Basic did exist in the 80s. I don't know where this idea came form the JS pioneered event driven programming. There have been GUIs with events since the 70s.

Visual Basic was released in 1991.

Smalltalk and Interlisp-D did it first.