From the first HTTP requests to early browsers like Mosaic, the Web’s 1990–1994 era pioneered practical image+text workflows that foreshadowed today’s multimodal APIs.
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.
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 the Web’s first years (1990–1994), there was no localStorage, no IndexedDB, and not even JavaScript. Yet developers still needed state. This chapter traces how early HTTP interfaces, forms, and the first cookie experiments pushed the Web toward browser storage APIs and richer client applications.
A look back at 1990–1994, when the Web’s earliest HTTP patterns—resources, links, forms, and simple request/response behavior—quietly established the API ideas that later powered Facebook Platform APIs and the social graph.
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.