From HTTP’s minimalist beginnings to early dynamic web gateways, 1990–1994 laid the practical foundations for later enterprise API discovery—ultimately motivating WSDL-style service descriptions even though WSDL itself arrived years later.
From HTTP/0.9 and early URLs to HTML forms and MIME types, 1990–1994 quietly created the web’s first practical API surface—long before JavaScript existed.
Before “web APIs” had a name, early HTTP and the newborn World Wide Web (1990–1994) established the core patterns APIs still use: resources, stateless requests, URIs, and a simple request/response contract.
Chapter 1 (1990–1994) of web API history: how early HTTP turned the newborn Web into a programmable interface—long before “REST” and “JSON” became everyday terms.