I disagree with the first sentence. In 199x the first people I knew making web pages dropped perl scripts, not C programs, into cgi-bin.

May have pre-dated you by a bit. Perl definitely took foot not long after but the earliest cgi-bin days were dominated by C before people got tired of fighting compilation for web apps.

IIRC the spec itself says it was built for C applications.

mod-perl was a godsend, of course.

I learnt Perl because I had to make a page with a form that would then be turned into Postscript and printed. My only options were C, which I knew well, and Perl, which I had never seen before. So I got to learning Perl. Doing it in C just seemed like too much work for the task.

Perl's CGI.pm was updated as recently as 5 months ago :)

https://metacpan.org/pod/CGI

Same. My first "web app" was a Perl CGI that saved data to mSQL (not MySQL), probably early 1995.

My first CGI programs around that time were in bash! I wrote so much useless but fun things back then.

I started using Perl in 1996.

But the very first CGI scripts I wrote were in C, late 95 or early 96. Apache on Slackware Linux.

I still have such Perl scripts deployed, though using FastCGI.

We did the CGI-bin in C thing at amzn in 1994.

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