If you're really interested in hunting down the origins of the World Wide Web, you may want to find a copy of the paper titled “As We May Think,” by Vannevar Bush. This paper was written in 1945 (no, that's not a typo) and talked about ways to organize information. His ideas look a lot like hypertext.

The WWW is still a very young phenomenon. Tim Berners-Lee invented the WWW in late 1990, while he was working at CERN—the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. He developed it so physicists working at various universities all over the world could have instantaneous access to information, to enable their collaboration on a variety of projects.

Tim defined URLs, HTTP, and HTML, and together with Robert Cailliau, wrote the first Web server, along with the first Web client software, which was later dubbed a browser.

Just a few years ago, it would have been necessary to explain what these concepts meant to all but the most technically aware audience. Now, there are few people (at least in developed nations) who are unaware of the WWW.

Shortly after Tim's initial work, a group at the National Center for Supercomputing Activities (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) developed the NCSA HTTPd Web server, and the NCSA Mosaic graphical Web browser. Mosaic was not the first graphical Web browser, although it is almost universally remembered as such. That honor rightfully belongs to Viola, written by Pei Wei, and available before Mosaic. But Mosaic quickly stole the spotlight, and most of the users, becoming the most widely used WWW browser some time in 1992.

NCSA HTTPd was the server most used on the WWW for the first several years of its existence. However, in 1994, Rob McCool, who had developed NCSA HTTPd, left NSCA, and the project fizzled. Because the source code of the server was publicly available many of the folks using it had developed their own bug fixes, and additional features that they needed for their own sites. These patches were shared via Usenet, but there was no centralized mechanism for collecting and distributing these patches.

In February of 1995, Brian Behlendorf and Cliff Skolnick put together a mailing list, got some space on a machine, and bandwidth donated by HotWired. This provided a way for a group of developers to collect their code modifications in one place, and produce a combined product. Starting with NCSA httpd 1.3, they started applying these patches. The first release of this product, which got the name Apache, was version 0.6.2, released in April of 1995.

A rumor quickly sprang up that the name was a pun on “patch”, because the server was built on patches to NCSA HTTPd, and hence it was “a patchy” server. The name is actually derived from the governmental structure of the Apache people, who govern by a meritocracy, meaning that those who contribute most to society get to be the leaders. This is how the Apache software projects work also.

The eight original core members of the Apache Group were Brian Behlendorf, Roy T. Fielding, Rob Hartill, David Robinson, Cliff Skolnick, Randy Terbush, Robert S. Thau, and Andrew Wilson.

Shortly after the initial release, Robert Thau designed a completely new architecture, and starting with version 0.8.8, in August of 1995, Apache was switched to this new code base.

Netcraft shows Apache passing NCSA as the leading HTTP server sometime in early 1996.

Suddenly, publications like The Wall Street Journal and Forbes are using the term “Open Source” in front page articles. This seems a little strange to those of us who have been familiar with the concept for a few decades and are used to it being ignored, or actively snubbed, by people in the commercial software industry.

In May of 1997, Eric Raymond gave his talk, entitled “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” at the Linux Kongress. This started a chain of events, not least of which was Netscape's decision to release the source code for their WWW browser. The software world was no longer able to ignore the “free software” movement, a branch of which renamed itself “Open Source” to shed some of the negative associations surrounding the free software movement.

In June of 1998, the Apache Group announced that they were entering in an agreement with IBM for the continuing development of the Apache server, so that IBM could include that code in their WebSphere product. This was one of the first examples of a major software company endorsing an existing Open Source project, and was one of the lynch pins in making the Open Source movement appear viable to the rest of the software world.

A consequence of the Apache-IBM agreement was the development of a Microsoft Windows version of the server. The Apache Group warns that Apache on Windows should not be considered as reliable as Apache on Unix and Unix-line platforms (for example, Linux), but improvements are still being made, and Apache 2.0 for Windows is a substantial improvement, in all measurable ways, over the 1.3 server on Windows.

In June of 1999, the Apache Software Foundation was incorporated as a not-for-profit corporation, in order to provide the necessary legal and financial protection for the members, and enable the group to receive financial donations.

Apache is just a fantastic product. It does everything you want it to do and none of the stuff that you don't want it to do. It's fast, reliable, and inexpensive. What more could you want from a piece of software?

Apache is able to be all of these things because it is Open Source. That means that everyone that uses the product has access to the source code. If they have an idea that would be useful, they can write the code for that feature and submit it back to the Apache Group for possible inclusion in the product.

What this means is that features that make it into Apache are features that real people are actually using on real Web sites, not features that someone suggested in a marketing meeting, after conducting a focus group.

It also means that when bugs are found, many people have access to the code, can determine what is breaking, and suggest fixes for the problem. Contrast this to closed-source software products, where something crashes, you get a cryptic error message, and you are at the mercy of a schedule set by an engineering manager. Hence, bug fixes usually follow closely on the heels of bug discoveries.

Apache was developed by actual users who needed to fix problems with, and add features to, the Web server software that was available in the early days of the WWW. As such, it is a server that does things that real Web sites need. Apache, and Apache derivatives, are used on about 60% of the Web sites on the Internet—more than all other Web servers combined.