This must be why they say programming is dead once you turn 40: You can no longer communicate with the young-ins.
No, it's even worse a misnomer when you are old enough to remember these days. They were CGI modules... running under a server. They were not "without a server". They didn't work without a server.
And in these days, we did have plenty of applications without any server. For instance, desktop applications using local in-process databases were very common, and plenty of what people nowadays do within their browser (connecting to a remote server on the other side of the world) was instead done using these local-only desktop applications. These applications are what could legitimately claim the moniker of "serverless". Not something which can only work when under the control of a server.
Not true at all. You can use CGI scripts from the shell just fine. And you almost certainly did to aid with testing! Per the CGI specification, communication is through environment variables, stdin, and stdout. There was not a server in the application like we saw later. Since around the mid-2000s, when CGI fell out of fashion, applications of this nature usually meant them serving on port 3000 (probably). "Serverless" sees removal of the server from the application again, moving back to a process-based concept similar to what we did when CGI was the thing to use, although the protocols may be different nowadays. It is not in reference to a specific technology like CGI, rather the broader idea.
> And in these days, we did have plenty of applications without any server.
"These types of applications", not "all applications"...
I understand both what you say and what "serverless" commonly means, I'm just saying it's essentially arbitrary. A symbol with no etymology that holds water.
Understandably, if you don't come from the software world you might think a server is a person who does work at your request, like serve you food at a restaurant. Is that where the problem lies? There are definitely still people, servers, serving the care to the systems that run the software. But that is clearly not the context in which it is used. It is very much used as a software term, and as a software term alone.
This might be why people are having trouble with it. "Cloud" and "serverless" both refer to hardware, not software.
"Cloud" was moving the hardware from something you managed, either in office or a datacenter, to using machines someone else managed, but it was still server-oriented (such as software in VMs or bare-metal that you managed).
"Serverless" drops even that, using ephemeral code that doesn't care what server it's running on, so the people managing the hardware can move your software as-needed.
