The Untold Story of Apache: The Server That Built the Web скачать в хорошем качестве

The Untold Story of Apache: The Server That Built the Web

In the first years of the web, the loudest thing in the room was silence. A beige tower under a desk in Urbana–Champaign hummed, a fan blade clipped a cable, and packets began a habit that would outlive fashions, fortunes, and founders. The program listening on that machine did something almost mystical for its time. It took a line of text from a distant browser, understood what was being asked, and sent back a page. A request, a response, a rhythm. That program would give rise to Apache, the web server that quietly powered the early internet and then kept powering it even as the stories drifted elsewhere. Apache is the software that sits on a computer, waits on ports like eighty and four hundred forty-three, speaks Hypertext Transfer Protocol, and serves files or forwards requests to other applications. It is used by universities and ministries, blogs and banks, newspapers and nations. It is the traffic cop, the maître d’, the stagehand, and often the scapegoat, depending on the night. The lineage begins with NCSA HTTPd, written at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois by a young developer named Rob McCool in the early nineteen nineties. When McCool left NCSA, development slowed. Around that moment in early nineteen ninety five, a loose network of webmasters began exchanging fixes for NCSA’s server. Patches multiplied. Someone made a joke that the software was “a patchy server,” and the name stuck with a wink and a double meaning. What formed next was the Apache Group, a small core that coalesced into a community, and by nineteen ninety nine that community formalized into the Apache Software Foundation, a home for the server and, eventually, for hundreds of other open projects. The server’s own site remembers those beginnings plainly, and you can still read how the patched NCSA daemon became a common distribution under the Apache banner.