Humble Beginnings: The Apache Project
One of the earliest web servers was developed by Rob McCool at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, referred to colloquially as the NCSA project, or NCSA for short. In 1995, the NCSA server was quite popular, but its future was uncertain as Rob left NCSA in 1994. A group of developers got together and compiled all the NCSA bug fixes and enhancements they had found and patched them into the NCSA code base. The developers released this new version in April 1995, and called it Apache, which was a sort of acronym for "A PAtCHy Web Server".
Apache was readily accepted by the web-serving community from its earliest days, and less than a year after its release it unseated NCSA to become the most used web server in the world (measured by the total number of servers running Apache), a distinction that it has held ever since (according to Apache's web site). Incidentally, during the same period that Apache's use spread, NCSA's popularity plummeted and by 1999 was officially discontinued by its maintainers.
For more information on the history of Apache and its developers, see http://httpd.apache.org/ABOUT_APACHE.html.
Today the Apache web server is available on pretty much any major operating system - as of this writing, downloads are available for 29 different operating systems. Apache can be found running on the some of the largest server farms in the world as well as on some of the smallest devices (including the Linux-based Sharp Zaurus hand-held). In Unix data centers, Apache is as ubiquitous as air conditioning and UPS systems.
While Apache was originally a somewhat mangy collection of miscellaneous patches, today's versions are state-of-the-art, incorporating rock-solid stability with bleeding edge features. The only real competitor to Apache in terms of market share and feature set is Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS), which is bundled free with certain versions of the Windows operating system. At the time of writing, Apache's market share was estimated at around 56%, with IIS at a distant 32% (statistics courtesy of http://www.netcraft.com/survey/, June 2002).
It is also worth nothing that Apache has a reputation of being much more secure than Microsoft IIS. When new vulnerabilities are discovered in either server, the Apache developers fix Apache far faster than Microsoft fixes IIS.
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