Platform · 1991–now · Web Boom
HTTP / HTTPS
The application protocol of the internet. HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 are evolutions, not replacements.
HTTP stuck because it is stateless, cache-friendly, and legible to humans with tcpdump. Every "real-time replacement" still falls back to HTTP for auth, assets, and deployment. TLS made it trustworthy; QUIC made it faster — same idea.
Context
The browser ate the desktop
The web became the default delivery surface. LAMP and Rails made shipping cheap; Ajax made pages feel like apps; SOAP/SOA tried to enterprise-ify the wire. REST won by being debuggable with curl. This decade invented the modern product cadence — and the habit of treating every new framework as destiny.