[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>