URI – Automated Hacks

Chapter 57 (1990–1994): The Birth of the Web’s First Interfaces—and Why Shopify-Style APIs Were Inevitable

From early HTTP requests and URIs to CGI gateways, 1990–1994 quietly established the interface patterns that modern commerce platforms—like Shopify—use for extensible APIs today. Chapter 57 of a chronological web API history series.

Chapter 12: 1990–1994 and the Quiet Origins of RESTful Thinking in Early Web Interfaces

Between 1990 and 1994, the Web’s earliest HTTP interactions weren’t called “APIs,” yet they introduced resource identity, uniform operations, and stateless requests—the same building blocks REST would later formalize.