Beginnings

As you may well recall, Tim Bernars-Lee at CERN, the European high- energy physics laboratory, invented the Web as a convenient means of sharing high-energy physics information stored in different forms on diverse servers. VMS systems were big players in the scientific community. (They'd been preeminent in the middle 1980s, but the price/performance of RISC-based UNIX workstations compared with that of the VAXes, which were the only VMS platform at the time, meant that the price-sensitive and performance-hungry scientific market was buying a lot of those as well.) So CERN developed Web servers for UNIX, for IBM machines, and for VMS.

The Web uses the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), so a typical name for a Web server is HTTPd, with the "d" standing for "daemon." (A "daemon" an essential concept on UNIX systems is a program that runs in the background, listening until it recognizes that it needs to do something, then doing it.) The first HTTPd was developed at CERN; and the first non-European Web server was installed at SLAC ^[1] in December 1991 (running on an IBM mainframe). My site started running the CERN HTTP server on VMS in 1993 (on a VAX 8700).

A basic Web server, one that just takes requests and serves files, isn't that hard to write. The requirements begin to get exponentially more complicated when the server needs...