CERN httpd (later also known as W3C httpd) is an early, now discontinued, web server (HTTP) daemon originally developed at CERN from 1990 onwards by Tim Berners-Lee, Ari Luotonen and Henrik Frystyk Nielsen.Official CERN httpd page Implemented in C, it was the first web server software.

History

CERN httpd was originally developed on a NeXT Computer running NeXTSTEP, and was later ported to other Unix-like operating systems, OpenVMS and systems with unix emulation layers, e.g. OS/2 with emx+gcc. It could also be configured as a web proxy server. Version 0.1 was released in June 1991.Change History for httpd In August 1991, Berners-Lee announced in the Usenet newsgroup alt.hypertext the availability of the source code of the server daemon (named WWWDaemon) and other World Wide Web software from the CERN FTP site.

The server was presented on the Hypertext 91 conference in San Antonio and was part of the CERN Program Library (CERNLIB).

Later versions of the server are based on the libwww library. The development of CERN httpd was later taken over by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), with the last release being version 3.0A of 15 July 1996. From 1996 onwards, W3C focused on the development of the Java-based Jigsaw server.

The initial version was public domain software; the last one was under an MIT License.The birth of the web Licensing the web on cern.ch (2014, archived)

Java rewrite

Jigsaw is a web server software written in Java. It is the successor to CERN httpd, the first web server software ever, and was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium.

Jigsaw supports HTTP/1.1 and is a reference implementation for the W3C and an experimental platform for the Internet community. The server is configurable via HTML forms, and new Java classes can be added during operation. Artikel-Archiv iX 9/1996, Seite 108

The first released version was 1.0alpha1 and appeared in June 1996. Version 2.0.0 was completed on December 24, 1998. The last released version is 2.2.6 from April 10, 2007.

See also

CERN Web server Comparison of web server software Apache Traffic Server Web accelerator, which discusses host-based HTTP acceleration Proxy server, which discusses client-side proxies Reverse proxy, which discusses origin-side proxies

References

External links The historic W3C page for httpd The historic web site in the W3C archive of November 1992 CERN republished her first website. Homepage of W3C-Jigsaw Project Homepage of CERN httpd