[marssaxman]

Perl was everywhere; that was its heyday.

PHP was not yet a joke. Or, rather, it was a joke, but a chuckler rather than the groaner it has become.

In 1999, if you said you were a software developer, that meant you wrote programs for people to use on their computers. If you wrote software that ran on servers, that was sort of unusual, so you would describe yourself as a "server-side developer" or something of that sort.

If all you did was make web pages, well, that was basically just gluing HTML tags together, so you were at best a "web designer". Maybe, just maybe, you could rise up to a sort of limited honorary "developer" status if your work involved a lot of heavy-duty CGI coding. Nobody would have called your tools a "dev environment" back then.

[ShawnJG]

I would definitely have to agree with you, it was a very segregated landscape. Web was all about HTML and DHTML and writing software for servers was a small niche. In the early 90s the first thing I ever get my hand on was Visual Basic I was young enough introduction. Then there was C++ and Perl and never got into PHP big-time but it was definitely prevalent no matter what your misgivings about it today is.