Probably more like ~2005. I was a web developer in 2001 and XMLHttpRequest still felt like secret knowledge that you only found out about by digging deep into Microsoft documentation (and wasn't well supported if you weren't using IE). Most people I knew were making pages interactive by targeting forms to iframes.
Some of us were using JAVA Applets to make async requests ;)
Say you're travelling back from 2099 and your comment still applies :-)