Apache HTTP Server Turns 15

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Happy 15th Birthday Apache! But wait, didn’t we just celebrate Apache’s 10th Birthday?

Not quite, today’s anniversary marks the birth of the Apache HTTP Server (often commonly referred to as just Apache), which pre-dates the Apache Software Foundation by five years. It is the success of the HTTP Server that led to the ASF.

Apache HTTP is one of the most important open source projects of all time, having dominated the web serving landscape since 1994 and now powering approximately 112 million sites. The birth of the web as we know it today, it’s early adoption and it’s current success is in part thanks to the success of Apache HTTP.

It was on February 23, 1994, 15 years ago today that the Apache ‘new-httpd’ mailing list was started a ‘fork’ of the NCSA httpd web server.  The first Apache release (officially numbered Apache (0.2) was released nearly a month later on March 18th, 1994.

Apache HTTP servers have served countless numbers of webpages since then. It’s all open source and has been for the last fifteen years.