In the Web’s earliest years, developers used simple HTTP interfaces, CGI scripts, and server modules to stitch together internal systems. This chapter traces how those early patterns anticipated microservices and modern internal API ecosystems.
From CERN’s early Web servers to proxies, protocol gateways, and CGI entry points, the years 1990–1994 introduced the core idea behind API gateways: one place to route, observe, and control traffic headed to many backends.
Swagger and OpenAPI feel modern, but their core ideas—contracts, endpoints, headers, and examples—trace back to the Web’s earliest HTTP interfaces. This chapter looks at 1990–1994 documentation practices that quietly set the pattern for today’s API tooling.
Slack’s API feels modern, but its core ideas—URLs as interfaces, stateless requests, simple payloads, and predictable responses—trace back to the Web’s earliest HTTP experiments from 1990 to 1994.
From the earliest HTTP requests to CGI-driven endpoints, the Web’s 1990–1994 interface ideas quietly shaped the patterns that power today’s GitHub API automation—webhooks, CI triggers, and machine-to-machine workflows.
Long before Twilio made communications programmable, the early Web (1990–1994) established the practical building blocks of web APIs: URL addressing, request/response patterns, and simple server interfaces that taught developers how to “call” a service over HTTP.
A chronological look at 1990–1994, when the Web’s earliest HTTP interfaces and URL conventions laid the groundwork for modern web APIs—providing historical context for developer-first platforms like Stripe.
From HTTP’s earliest GET-only world to HTML forms, CGI, URL standardization, and early cookies, 1990–1994 quietly created the patterns that later became payment APIs and modern checkout flows.
From 1990 to 1994, the Web had URLs, MIME types, and early HTTP—but not browser-native audio/video. This chapter explains how those early interfaces shaped what HTML5 media APIs eventually became.
Server-Sent Events (SSE) arrived much later, but the need for streaming updates was visible from the Web’s earliest days. This chapter traces how HTTP’s simple request/response model (1990–1994) created both the problem—and the early experiments—that led to modern streaming web APIs.