Dot-com
Internet history during the dot-com era, from the 1990s through to the first few years of the 2000s.
Note: many of these articles were migrated from my previous website, Web Development History (WDH), which was active during 2021. Check the timeline for a chronological list of WDH posts.
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1995: Apache and Microsoft IIS Shake Up the Web Server Market
The Apache project was publicly announced in April 1995. It was followed soon after by Microsoft's first web server software, Internet Information Server (IIS).
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1994: How Perl Became the Foundation of Yahoo
The founding of Yahoo is one of the iconic Silicon Valley business stories. What’s lesser known is the web development story of Yahoo throughout 1994, based on a scripting language called Perl.
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1998: Open Season with Mozilla, W3C’s DOM, and WaSP
1998 was 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.
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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).
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1997: JavaScript Grows Up and Developers Push the Boundaries
Pointy-headed technical analysis of JavaScript was not what was required in 1997. Developers of that era needed practical guidance and code samples.
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1995: PHP Quietly Launches as a CGI Scripts Toolset
If CGI scripts were the start of interactive programming on the web, then Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools) was the natural next step — at least on the server-side.
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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.
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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.
