Web Development History

September 15, 2021 by ricmac 0 comments

1995: MySQL Arrives, Completing the LAMP Stack

By the end of 1995, the foundational pieces of the open source LAMP stack for web development (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python) were in place. The acronym itself would not be coined for another few years, but the technology had arrived — albeit at varying stages of maturity and adoption. MySQL was initially an internal database system used by a Swedish company called TcX, from May 1995 onwards. It had been created by Michael (Monty) Widenius, and took a number of years to gain traction.

August 31, 2021 by ricmac 2 comments

1995: Apache and Microsoft IIS Shake Up the Web Server Market

1995 was a big year for web servers — it was when both the open source Apache and Microsoft’s IIS were launched. Apache and IIS ended up usurping their direct competitors (NCSA HTTPd and Netscape’s web servers, respectively). However, Apache was the web server that most influenced the future direction of web development.

August 10, 2021 by ricmac 1 comment

1994: How Perl Became the Foundation of Yahoo

development story of Yahoo throughout 1994 — which is the focus of this article. In particular, we’ll explore how a scripting language invented by Larry Wall in 1987, called Perl, became the glue that made Yahoo stick in the public consciousness.

July 26, 2021 by ricmac 0 comments

The Time I Met Bill English

This post is to honour the one-year anniversary of the passing of Bill English, at age 91, on 26 July, 2020. English was Doug Engelbart’s right-hand man in the Mother of All Demos in 1968 and a key developer of the oN-Line System (NLS). The post below was initially part of a book I was writing about Engelbart. The book was eventually abandoned, but the memory of meeting English in 2014 remains. As does, I hope, the achievements of those SRI pioneers. RIP, Bill.

June 30, 2021 by ricmac 1 comment

1998: Open Season with Mozilla, W3C’s DOM, and WaSP

It may seem like Microsoft won the browser war in 1998 (despite a looming anti-trust case), but looking back it, was actually the year the web started to open up. It was when open source projects like Mozilla and open standards like DOM began to steer the web towards a more open, equitable future. It was also the year that a coalition of independent web developers arrived on the scene to promote open standards — The Web Standards Project (WaSP). All of these developments would impact the web’s direction for years to come.

June 2, 2021 by ricmac 0 comments

1997: The Year of DHTML

DHTML, or Dynamic HTML, was essentially a combination of HTML, JavaScript, the newly released CSS standard, and an emerging web programming model called the DOM (Document Object Model). That said, the precise definition of DHTML depended on which browser company you spoke to: Netscape or Microsoft.

As it turned out, Microsoft’s vision for DHTML was more compelling from a technical perspective than Netscape’s (perhaps the first time that could be said about a web technology Microsoft pioneered — but it would not the last). What Microsoft wanted to achieve with DHTML was to make every element of an HTML document into a programmable object.

May 4, 2021 by ricmac 0 comments

1997: JavaScript Grows Up and Developers Push the Boundaries

By the start of 1997, JavaScript had become a regular topic for tech reference websites and books. JavaScript was now a sophisticated language, with new features like layers adding a further dynamic dimension to its capabilities.

April 13, 2021 by ricmac 0 comments

1995: PHP Quietly Launches as a CGI Scripts Toolset

If CGI scripts were the start of interactive programming on the web, then PHP was the natural next step — at least on the server-side. Just a month after Brendan Eich created the JavaScript scripting language at Netscape, an independent developer from Canada named Rasmus Lerdorf released the first version of a toolset he called Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools). At this point, it wasn’t a scripting language (although it would eventually become one). As of June 1995, when Lerdorf announced the project to the comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi mailing list, it was a utility library and templating engine for the Common Gateway Interface (CGI). In modern terms, we can think of it as similar to a JavaScript library like React — although obviously much less complicated, since this was 1995.

March 24, 2021 by ricmac 3 comments

1993: CGI Scripts and Early Server-Side Web Programming

A couple of years before JavaScript was invented, a specification called the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) enabled an early form of interactivity for web pages. While a CGI script wasn’t a dynamic component in the browser, like JavaScript was, it did allow early web users in 1993 and 1994 to run interactive programs. In many ways then, it was CGI — not JavaScript — that was the start of web applications.

March 9, 2021 by ricmac 0 comments

1997: Netscape Crossware vs the Windows Web

After Microsoft upped the ante in the browser market in 1996 by integrating Internet Explorer 3.0 into Windows, Netscape began the new year with a renewed focus on the open web. Co-founder and CTO Marc Andreessen and the Netscape product team introduced a new strategy called “crossware.”