Many of us wrote our own 'php' in those times. Just some (fast)cgi blurp that read a vanilla perl file and wrapped it (via Apache pre-script/post-script) in the tooling to get the $_GET/$_POST, print "Content-Type: text/html\n\n", set/get cookies etc and returned the output of the script as something like XML. We stuck with Perl for a long time because of cpan and it was, especially then, a much better language when used in the right way. It was often abused (and I still do, because slightly complex scripts are still really easy to do in perl), but so was php. So I'm guessing the ease of php deployment if you didn't have access to the Apache of the server running would be a big thing.