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by davidw 5997 days ago
Exactly. My career started back then, and there really wasn't a lot out there:

* CGI (mostly done with Perl).

* mod_perl (a huge ungainly mess)

* ASP (no thanks, not a Microsoft guy)

* Various proprietary things

* Various niche players (my own mod_dtcl [later Apache Rivet] was faster and IMO, nicer than PHP, but never got more than a modest amount of traction).

By the time I even started writing mod_dtcl, PHP was already pretty widely used, and we were using it in production at the company I worked for, and it was certainly better/faster than doing things in Perl CGI's.

These days, I really, really, really don't like having anything to do with PHP after having dealt with too many unholy messes, but I can't deny that it got some critical things right at the right time.