[whartung]

Actually I think what killed inetd is, partially, http. At the time, http was connectionless. Open socket, send packet, read response, close. Out of the box inetd would support that, for sure, but it would be constantly forking new http processes to do it.

FTP, SMTP were all stateful, so living under inetd worked OK. One process per overall session rather than individual messages within a session.

Obviously, inetd could have been hammered on to basically consume the pre-forking model then dominant in something like Apache, caching server processes, etc.

But it wasn't. Then databases became the other dominant server process, and they didn't run behind inetd either.

Apache + CGI was the "inetd" of the web age.