VM already existed since PL/0 which is the prototype of Pascal. It is also known as P-code and to.be honest it is fine. Especially when you can leverage JIT which trades memory space for gains in speed.
If you mean bytecode as executable format, that originates already in the late 1950's, early 1980's, with microcoded CPUs as the interpreter, from which Burroughs Large Systems is one of the most famous ones.
