Do you need someone to google that for you? Really not a good way to ask a question. Public APIs as we see them now were not a thing in 2000. There were talks

Do you need someone to google that for you? Really not a good way to ask a question. Public APIs as we see them now were not a thing in 2000. There were talks about web services, but that was really different story (see WSDL). SOAP became a standard only in 2003 and it had different set of constraints and purpose.