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MS-ASP or CGI. 20 years ago PHP was like "amazing", compared to what else was around. Maybe ColdFusion
by edoceo 7y ago
MS-ASP or CGI. 20 years ago PHP was like "amazing", compared to what else was around. Maybe ColdFusion
- toyg 7y agoColdFusion was terribly expensive, like all the other stuff like WebObjects or Netscape. The Microsoft stuff was expensive AND insecure. CGI (i.e. Perl) was cheap but annoying to learn, setup, and maintain. Java was sluggish and unusable in shared-host environments (i.e. expensive, again). PHP hit an optimum equilibrium between usability, features, and price. This only changed when virtualization changed the hosting game. Arguably PHP is still very close in terms of usability - deployment is fundamentally trivial - it's just lagging elsewhere.
- antod 7y agoYup, those were the two web "stacks" I had tried before PHP - around 1999 or so. At the time PHP did feel amazing compared to Classic ASP in VBScript (shudder), and I never really felt comfortable with Perl. There were other things like Zope and Roxen/Pike around back then, but I never used them. Ah and OpenACS/AOLServer which was TCL from memory.