Introduction
In the early days, Web developers wrote every page by hand. Updating a Web site meant editing HTML; a "redesign" involved redoing every single page, one at a time.
As Web sites grew and became more ambitious, it quickly became obvious that that situation was tedious, time-consuming, and ultimately untenable. A group of enterprising hackers at NCSA (the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, where Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser, was developed) solved this problem by letting the Web server spawn external programs that could generate HTML dynamically. They called this protocol the Common Gateway Interface, or CGI, and it changed the Web forever.
It's hard now to imagine what a revelation CGI must have been: instead of ...
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