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This makes me nostalgic. Spent inordinate amounts of time writing terrible, unmaintainable Perl scripts and FTPing them to cgi-bin on free 5MB hosting plans on
by knadh 7y ago
This makes me nostalgic. Spent inordinate amounts of time writing terrible, unmaintainable Perl scripts and FTPing them to cgi-bin on free 5MB hosting plans on F2S and Netfirms. Most hosts wouldn't provide error logs, so there was nothing more than a 500 page from httpd to tell you that something had gone wrong. Debugging anything was an endeavor. Then of course, PHP came along and killed cgi-bin.
If I had to pick one thing to represent the CGI era, it would be Matt's FormMail [1].
[1] https://www.scriptarchive.com/formmail.html https://www.scriptarchive.com/formmail.html
- maxyme 7y agoOh man I remember using the Netfirms free tier! The internet was so different back then, a company wasn't afraid of giving free compute resources on subdomains of their main site.
- patsplat 7y agoSo many problems solved by formmail.pl
- johnchristopher 7y agoWhen PHP used to mean "Powerful Heavenly Perl". Rumor had it the first version was written in Perl.
- darrenf 7y agoNo, it was Personal HomePage tools. It was written in C. Rasmus even explicitly said you didn't need Perl when he first announced it on Usenet, here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi/PyJ25gZ6z7A/M9FkTUVDfcwJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.infosystems.www.a...
- johnchristopher 7y agoI know, that's why I used the word `rumor`. Powerful Heavenly Perl was a geek joke (like PlentyofHorsePower).
- beanjammin 7y agoMatt's Script Archive was a great resource.
- wdr1 7y agoMatt's Script Archive was a great source of security holes.
- lloeki 7y ago> terrible, unmaintainable Perl scripts Lucky you. At a previous workplace I had to cater with actual binaries produced from C source code that contained strings that contained script tags that contained JS code that generated HTML. I’ll let you sink that in and process the escaping. Apparently it never occurred to some people that they could read those from disk, even from the C program.
- deckard1 7y ago> PHP came along and killed cgi-bin PHP was using CGI like Perl. And then PHP had Apache's mod_php, which I believe is still widely used today. Perl, of course, had mod_perl. And later, PSGI/Plack followed by Catalyst, Mojolicious, Dancer, etc.
- johannes1234321 7y agomod_perl had the issue that it had hooks deep into the webserver, which wasn't "shared hosting safe" mod_php had less hooks and some basic cross-vhost-access mitigations (Safe_mode oben_basedir etc.) which allowed independent users to put PHP scripts on the same server, which in turn made web hosting cheap.
- chriswarbo 7y agoWhen I last used PHP (about 5 years ago) it was common to use it via FastCGI "for performance". I'm not sure how true that reasoning was, or how the speedups of 7.x have changed things, but (Fast/S/whatever)CGI still seems prevalent.