I was a maturing young programmer back then. The leading alternative was Perl, which was still pretty lively but had a lot of the same complaints at the time that it does now (readability). Perl's what I was primarily using; it took me a bit to adopt PHP, but once I did, I never looked back.

Some folks were also compiling C and gluing it together with a CGI module, and a lot of others in the Microsoft world were using Frontpage and its brethren. But, the Microsoft stack only ran on Windows servers, and Windows web servers had a reputation (deserved, imo) for kinda sucking.

PHP's killer feature was mod_php. It was dead simple to integrate into any shared hosting environment, and so pretty much every shared host did. mod_php magically knew how to spit out html when reading html, and execute php when encountering php tags, so that gave us the html-mixed-with-php pattern that was wonderful at the time but considered bad practice now.

But also scope has changed a lot. At the time, people were mostly looking for hit counters, contact forms, and "guestbook" forms. For all those things, PHP excelled, so it gobbled up the market fast.

Remember Matt's Script Archive? That was all Perl and covered a lot of the hit counter, contact/guestbook and forum software pre-PHP.

My first website back in `96 also had some compiled C via cgi. No database. I've said this before but using compiled Go with the web brought back memories of those good old days.

I spent about 4 years doing classic ASP before .Net arrived and had a hand in building a lot of big sites some of which still exist (and still use ASP): Most corporate jobs seemed to use the Microsoft stack then (or Java), where PHP was the what you did on the side because it didn't require server licensing.

It's often overlooked that many of the cheap hosting companies who provided the environment for PHP's phenomenal growth only offered PHP as a CGI. You often had to pay a lot more if you wanted mod_php because it was harder to secure and required more resources. PHP/CGI was the way to max out the number of users on a server even it was slower.

> PHP's killer feature was mod_php. It was dead simple to integrate into any shared hosting environment, and so pretty much every shared host did

Also safe_mode and open_basedir, which promised shared hosting providers that their users wouldn't hack the server and each other

The big alternatives were: Perl if you had the technical chops and a host who'd basically let you have root access to the hosting machine (C/C++ worked this way too through CGI), ColdFusion which isn't really an alternative, ASP using VBScript which was wordy, complicated, slow, and gave almost no help to the developer (Provider error '80004005': Unspecified error) when a bug appeared unless it was during object initialization.

Once you could get Apache with mod_php set up, PHP felt like something you could use to actually get stuff done.

MS-ASP or CGI. 20 years ago PHP was like "amazing", compared to what else was around. Maybe ColdFusion

Yup, those were the two web "stacks" I had tried before PHP - around 1999 or so. At the time PHP did feel amazing compared to Classic ASP in VBScript (shudder), and I never really felt comfortable with Perl.

There were other things like Zope and Roxen/Pike around back then, but I never used them. Ah and OpenACS/AOLServer which was TCL from memory.

ColdFusion was terribly expensive, like all the other stuff like WebObjects or Netscape. The Microsoft stuff was expensive AND insecure. CGI (i.e. Perl) was cheap but annoying to learn, setup, and maintain. Java was sluggish and unusable in shared-host environments (i.e. expensive, again).

PHP hit an optimum equilibrium between usability, features, and price. This only changed when virtualization changed the hosting game. Arguably PHP is still very close in terms of usability - deployment is fundamentally trivial - it's just lagging elsewhere.

Perl was the most comparable but CGI was limiting and I don't recall a lot of strong, simple frameworks. Also, it was Perl.

I was primarily a Perl programmer at the time, responsible for writing CGI apps that were slow and unreadable to anyone I worked with who didn't know Perl.

I think vbasic was around but that required IIS and was an unmitigated disaster in every way. I sadly had to work in that a lot too.

I never messed with coldfusion but it seemed to get the job done for people who did.

Most Perl web development was done with Lincoln Stein's CGI.pm in the late 90s. HTML::Mason was Perl's answer to PHP but it relied on mod_perl which most hosting companies were not prepared to let you have on the cheap. You could do CGI.pm procedural style or OO style with $obj->method() calls similar to PHP. "MySQL and Perl for the Web" by Dubois was a pretty good web primer at the time based on CGI.pm. This and "Programming Perl" got me started after I became intrigued by regular expressions which led to a deep interest in Perl. It's easy to forget that Perl was VERY cool back in the early 2000s. Reading "Programming Perl" for me was like reading great literature. Larry Wall the linguist really comes through strongly in the book.