Wow! A blast from the past. I started my career in the mid-90s writing software with exactly this same stack.

It's funny—you just need a cgi-bin:

1. with 1777 permissions (sticky bit set); and

2. rsynced between a cluster of systems;

and you've got a modern Function-as-a-Service backend.

And of course you want to use a flat file database on an NFS server, maybe using some cool flock()s to synchronize writes :)

Only to then realise that naive flock() won't cut it on your basic NFS setup so you resort to bizarre tricks like using hard links to the lock file to emulate proper locking on NFS because they can tell you which of the racing clients won. Those were good times... right?

I think you mean setuid bit. The sticky bit (on binaries) went away when we got VMM/swap.

No, I'm talking about the sticky bit for directories: see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_bit#Usage

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setuid#sticky_bit

cgic was a great library, even if it was still excruciatingly tedious to write. I'm not entirely certain whether I discovered cgic or Perl first, but I know which one I preferred writing.

You might be surprised (or horrified) how much is still out there...

Now... If this is true, it is scary indeed :).

I started with something built on the CGI.pm Perl module.