Just to back that up, it had a clear meaning because -less is a valid suffix to append to English words. When grandma runs out of cookies she is cookieless (when a website doesn't use cookies it is also cookieless). It doesn't have to be "in the dictionary" to make sense in conversation.

A quick search of usenet shows "serverless" being used in 1994. It wasn't a term or a buzzword, it wasn't common, it was just English: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.linux.misc/r76oNl98C...

Yes, this is what I was trying to say. It wasn't a thing people would throw around like a buzzword but if someone used it in conversation and especially in context (like the SQLite page, which was written over a decade ago, does) people would understand what you meant.

> does not operate on a client-server architecture

That was never a common usage of the term serverless.

The linked article was written in 2007, for your information.

Software development didn't begin or end with web dev and the cloud.