[npalli]

The early '90s only had GET in the HTTP protocol (0.9) so you couldn't actually build any CRUD applications. Quite far from it. POST came in 96 (1.0) and PUT, DELETE in 97 (1.1). REST was introduced in 2000 by Fielding and the idea that the web could used to build large scalable applications slowly gained momentum as CRUD was mapped to POST/GET/PUT/DELETE and the proposal gathered steam in '00s. In the meantime massive amount of engineering went into making JavaScript workable, performance wise (Chrome/V8). Everything came together only in the late 2000's. So, quite far from claiming web as a viable mechanism for building applications in the early '90s.

[icedchai]

HTTP POST was in common use well before 1996. It was standardized with HTTP 1.0 in 1996, but form POSTs were common well before then. People were developing "web apps" in the 90's using Perl CGIs, ASP pages (VB script), and even Javascript (Netscape's web server supported server side Javascript applications.)

[cxr]

It's funny that there's contention on this. Here's someone trying to answer the question in 2002:

> The purpose of this document is to answer the question "When did we start seeing web-forms that captured credit-card details, and passed them to CGI-scripts, thereby enabling interaction with server-side applications

<http://www.rogerclarke.com/II/WCBirth.html>

[cxr]

In addition to icedchai's comment, there are two more issues worth quibbling about what's written here:

It's odd to say something like "REST was introduced in 2000 by Fielding", since it makes it sound like support for a feature. But REST is just a description of how the Web works. Fielding's dissertation is a retrospective, documenting what the real work of standardization at IETF and among browser makers and server distributions had already earlier enabled.

Secondly, JS was workable performance-wise in the early 2000s in Netscape 6, even without a JIT.

[grogenaut]

Yet there I was building online shopping apps in 96 in my internship. Get was more than good enough for a search of the catalog to find what you needed. Our system just sent an order email in and we called you for payment. That was via post.

Amazon went public a year later.

[bawolff]

You can definitely make a crud app with only GET. E.g. PHP used to have support for automatically adding session ids to urls in links, for people who didn't like cookies.