The Apache HTTP Server is an open-source web server program. According to the project’s own history, it began in February 1995 when a small group of webmasters gathered to coordinate their fixes and enhancements to the NCSA httpd server, whose development had stalled after its lead programmer left NCSA in mid-1994. They based their work on NCSA httpd 1.3.
The same history records the first official public release, version 0.6.2, in April 1995, followed by a redesign with a modular architecture code-named “Shambhala” in mid-1995, and the release of Apache 1.0 on December 1, 1995. By 1996, Netcraft surveys showed Apache had passed NCSA’s httpd to become the most used web server on the Internet.
Apache served much of the early web and became the “A” in the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python), the common open-source foundation for dynamic websites. The project’s history also notes that the Apache Software Foundation was formed in 1999 to provide organizational, legal, and financial support.