Development status discontinued Available in C | Operating system | |
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Developer(s) CERN / World Wide Web Consortium Initial release 24 December 1990; 26 years ago (1990-12-24) Last release 3.0A / 15 July 1996; 20 years ago (1996-07-15) | ||
CERN httpd (later also known as W3C httpd) was a web server (HTTP) daemon originally developed at CERN from 1990 onwards by Tim Berners-Lee, Ari Luotonen and Henrik Frystyk Nielsen. Implemented in C, it was the first ever web server software.
History
CERN httpd was originally developed on a NeXT Computer running NeXTSTEP, and was later ported to other Unix-like operating systems, OpenVMS and systems with unix emulation layers, e.g. OS/2 with emx+gcc. It could also be configured as a web proxy server. Version 0.1 was released in June 1991. In August 1991, Berners-Lee announced in the Usenet newsgroup alt.hypertext the availability of the source code of the server daemon and other World Wide Web software from the CERN FTP site.
The server was presented on the Hypertext 91 conference in San Antonio and was part of the CERN Program Library (CERNLIB).
Later versions of the server are based on the libwww library. The development of CERN httpd was later taken over by W3C, with the last release being version 3.0A of 15 July 1996. From 1996 onwards, W3C focused on the development of the Java-based Jigsaw server.
The initial version was public domain software; the last one was under an MIT license.