This. PHP was my first "real" programming language (which is a bit scary now that I think about it since it followed me learning QBasic and VB6) and by the time

This. PHP was my first "real" programming language (which is a bit scary now that I think about it since it followed me learning QBasic and VB6) and by the time I was messing with it for web dev circa 2003 CGI scripts were on their way out. I suspect that it had something to do with CPanel/WHM-based shared hosting setups being reticent to deal with something as powerful as CGI and preferring to just run PHP in Safe Mode. I could be wrong though as I was also a technically-ignorant punk that fixed phpBB installer filesystem permission issues by 777'ing everything in my hosting directory :-). Good times...