[Reedx]

That's also how the most popular guestbooks and forums in the 90s worked. e.g., WWWBoard, which seemed to be used almost everywhere for quite a while. A perl script would generate a new HTML file and update the index HTML for each post.

[robinhouston]

The only trouble was they didn’t do it atomically, so if two people posted at the same time everything would get horribly mangled.

There was a reason we moved to database-backed sites.

[tjoff]

I surely hope that wasn't the reason.