Between 1990 and 1994, the Web’s simplest building blocks—URLs, HTTP requests, and server-side gateway scripts—quietly formed the earliest “public web APIs.” This chapter traces how those early interfaces made proto-mashups possible long before the term existed.
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.
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.