From HTTP’s earliest request/response patterns to CGI scripts and directory-like endpoints, 1990–1994 set the API-shaped foundation that FHIR later embraced for healthcare interoperability.
In the early 1990s, the Web’s simplest idea—request a resource with a URL over HTTP—quietly introduced patterns that would later define open banking APIs and financial data portability.
From the birth of the Web to Mosaic-era growth, 1990–1994 quietly introduced the first monetized, API-like products: HTTP gateways, CGI scripts, and paid data access—long before “API marketplaces” became a category.
Long before today’s cloud provider APIs, early HTTP servers, HTML forms, and CGI scripts (1990–1994) taught developers a powerful idea: infrastructure can be controlled through simple, stateless web interfaces.
In 1990–1994, the Web’s earliest HTTP interfaces favored small, single-purpose handlers long before anyone said “serverless.” This chapter traces how early gateways and CGI-style scripts foreshadowed today’s lightweight API backends.
Long before “Jamstack” had a name, early Web builders were already practicing its core idea: prebuilding pages from remote data. In 1990–1994, HTTP’s simple request/response model, early gateways, and CGI scripts laid the groundwork for build-time API consumption—even if nobody called it that yet.
In the Web’s first years (1990–1994), HTTP was tiny, servers were simple, and “APIs” mostly meant speaking basic request/response over the network. Those constraints later produced AJAX—and eventually the Fetch API, which modernized the same fundamental idea.
WebRTC arrived decades later, but its DNA traces back to the Web’s first years: early HTTP rules, headers, content types, and gateway patterns that taught browsers how to negotiate capabilities.
In 1990–1994, the Web’s earliest HTTP interactions were simple, document-centric, and slow by today’s standards—but they established the core constraints that later pushed developers toward service-style APIs and, eventually, high-performance systems like gRPC.
In the Web’s first years, “APIs” were often just URLs and forms hitting CGI scripts. Those primitive HTTP interfaces introduced a surprisingly modern idea: clients can influence what data they get back—an early ancestor of today’s client-driven data fetching and GraphQL-style thinking.