History of APIs
Where the modern web API came from, who built it, what got forgotten, and why the patterns keep repeating.
Before the Web API
RPC
Remote Procedure Call, the precursor model to modern web APIs.
CORBA
Common Object Request Broker Architecture, the heavyweight distributed computing predecessor.
EDI
Electronic Data Interchange, the original machine-to-machine business integration.
Birth Era (1999–2005)
Salesforce
The first major enterprise SaaS company to open its platform via API in 2000.
eBay
An early adopter of the marketplace API model enabling third-party commerce.
Amazon
The e-commerce and cloud company that bet its entire platform on APIs.
Flickr
The social photo platform whose API defined the mashup era.
Delicious
The social bookmarking service that helped popularize REST and tagging via API.
Platform Era (2006–2012)
The platform whose API both enabled and then constrained an entire ecosystem.
The social platform that pioneered the platform API strategy and its consequences.
The company whose API sprawl shaped both developer expectations and governance challenges.
Twilio
The cloud communications company that proved the API-as-product business model.
Stripe
The payments company that set the modern bar for API developer experience.
AWS
Amazon Web Services that turned infrastructure into programmable API primitives.
Foursquare
The location API company at the center of the mobile-social API era.
The photo-sharing platform that rose and closed its API in a cautionary arc.
Service Provider Layer
Mashery
One of the first API management platforms, shaping the commercial API layer.
3Scale
The open-source-friendly API management platform acquired by Red Hat.
Apigee
The API management leader that defined enterprise API gateway practices.
Postman
The API client that became the collaboration platform for the entire lifecycle.
Public Sector
Government
Public sector APIs from open data initiatives to regulated interoperability mandates.
Protocols & Specifications
OpenAPI
The specification that emerged from Swagger to become the industry contract standard.
AsyncAPI
The specification that brought the OpenAPI model to event-driven APIs.
GraphQL
Facebook's query language that offered a flexible alternative to REST.
Microservices
The architectural shift that made internal APIs as important as external ones.
MCP
Model Context Protocol and the latest chapter in API integration history.