Per started this as a replacement for his old WWW server, a very small, but buggy C program, launched from inetd. After a while, he moved on to LPC4, a language designed primarily for writing MUDs, but the language has excellent string and socket support, so it is more or less ideal for writing WWW-servers in. As a matter of fact, the language was never used for anything but WWW servers and other mixed tools, like a webster dictionary lookup program.

As Spider evolved, it became more and more complex, and even more features were added. It might be said that this program is, in the same way as the NCSA httpd and the CERN-server, suffering from a severe case of feeping creaturism, but in a more pronounced way.

The first version went on-line almost two years ago (In November 1993). Back then it was a quick and dirty hack, but it worked, and it had a few extra features that we used at Lysator, like some special pathnames, i.e. /~{name}, which means automagically generated info for the user {name}. All this without CGI scripts. As a matter of fact, CGI was not even invented, or, at least not announced to the public.

This, and the fact that a lot of our info had to be preprocessed, made it hard to adapt an existing server. Therefore, he continued his work with this server, and then other persons took interrest in the development as well. This was the birth of Spider 2.

As the world turned, Spider grew and grew...

At the end of 1994, Per decided to start making a new version from scratch. He left LPC4, in favour for uLPC. Insead of using one huge file, Spider 3 should be based upon modules. When the first version of Spider 3 went online, everyone was surprised by it's extreme speed, compared to Spider 2. However the bugs were everywhere, and it still needed lots of hacking...

Sometime during the beginning of 1995, Spider 3 changed name to Spinner and the graphical WWW based configuration interface started to work well. However was painfull kludgy to use, when lots of changes were to be made.

Now is released. The graphical configuration interface has been rewritten from scratch and many bugs have been exterminated (although they are not all dead yet...).