...in the beginning

In the beginning was the internet and the internet was bland (unless you liked text) and the internet was boring (unless you got flamed on the newsgroups).

Thus ended the first (boring) day.

Tim Berners-Lee (God) saw the internet and thought "let there be pages, and let them be linked and let there be colour and graphics"; and there were pages and there was colour and there were graphics, and God saw the internet and said "now it is a web, and the web is good". And the people saw the web and said, "wow, we can use this even if we aren't particle physicists" and the people started to use the web and write their own pages (and not all of them were students).

Thus ended the second day.

Then the people got restless, "we don't just want static pages", they cried; "we want dynamic pages, we want information that changes depending on what we put into our browsers, we want phone books", they wailed. God heard the cries and responded with forms, and radio buttons and text boxes and cgi so that the people would be happy, and the people smiled. The archangel Larry Wall brought forth a perl and said "lo, tho it was not created for this purpose, see how perl works with cgi" and the people rejoiced.

Thus ended the third day.

Then Bill Gates (The Devil/St. Paul - delete as appropriate) saw the web, and cgi, and perl and all the people whose souls weren't his and said unto himself "damn, I'll have to rewrite my book and convince people that I was for the web all along". And Bill set his pixies to labour long and hard and produced a browser (Internet Explorer v2), and a web server (Internet Information Server v1) to demonstrate his conversion, and they weren't much cop and the people did laugh, and some of them threw stones from their Mosaic.

Thus ended the fourth day.

And Bill did wail and gnash his teeth and said to his pixies "work harder and make my products work and then give them away". The pixies worked and toiled and lo, produced Internet Explorer 3 (which was still not much cop) and Internet Information Server v2 (which was better). And then Bill looked at the web and said, "lo, on the third day the people were rejoicing because they had cgi and perl and things that I did not provide them with; would they not further rejoice if I was to provide for them the same, only better?" and he set his pixies to work.

Thus ended the fifth day.

And on the sixth day, active server pages were born. And some of the people scorned, because they always scorned Bill; and some of the people scorned because they said Bill had just re-invented what was already there and called it his own; and some people scorned because it wasn't cross platform (like perl) and only ran on Win95/NT machines. But some of the people said "hey, we have NT, we have web servers, we have Access and MS SQL Server and we don't want to learn perl, which is for the bearded unwashed (or UNIX users as they are known). We like Visual Basic and want to do exciting and dynamic things with our web pages", and they praised Bill and rejoiced.

Thus ended the sixth day

And on the seventh day, the Web Host Directory was born.