Industry contemporary
The Apache Software Foundation
The web server that ran the web, built by eight people trading patches by email.
Apache began in February 1995 as a set of patches to a web server nobody was maintaining any more. Within a year it was the most-used server on the internet, and it held that position for most of two decades - the default answer to 'what serves this site' for a whole generation of the web.
The public-domain HTTP daemon written by Rob McCool at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications was the most popular server software on the web in early 1995, and its development had stalled when McCool left NCSA in mid-1994. Webmasters had each written their own fixes and extensions with no common place to put them. Brian Behlendorf - who had been patching the NCSA code so it could handle user registration for HotWired, Wired magazine's site - and Cliff Skolnick set up a mailing list and a shared machine in the Bay Area, with bandwidth donated by HotWired.
By the end of February 1995 eight core contributors had formed the Apache Group: Brian Behlendorf, Roy Fielding, Rob Hartill, David Robinson, Cliff Skolnick, Randy Terbush, Robert Thau and Andrew Wilson. The first public release, 0.6.2, came out in April 1995; version 1.0 followed on 1 December, and within a year Apache had passed NCSA httpd to become the most-used web server on the internet.
The name has two explanations and the project has given both. The original FAQ said the result of combining all those patches was 'a patchy server'. Behlendorf said in 2000 that it was chosen out of respect for the Apache people, then in 2007 said it was the patches after all. The ASF's own position today credits the tribe. Both stories are in the record, which is why both are here.
In June 1999 the Apache Group incorporated as the Apache Software Foundation, a Delaware non-profit, with Behlendorf as its first president - so that the project would outlast any individual volunteer. That structure is why the ASF now hosts hundreds of projects rather than one server.
Roy Fielding, one of the original eight, went on to co-author the HTTP/1.1 specification and to define REST in his doctoral dissertation. The people who wrote the server also wrote much of what the server speaks.