If you've ever deployed a website, spun up an app, or even just browsed the internet, you've interacted with servers. But have you ever wondered how we got here—from room-sized mainframes tended by specialists in lab coats to servers you can spin up with a single command?
In this post, we'll trace the history of servers, from the first time-sharing systems to today's personal server renaissance. Let's go!
The Mainframe Era
In the 1960s, if you wanted to use a computer, you went to it—it didn't come to you. Mainframes were massive machines that filled entire rooms, humming away in climate-controlled data centers, tended by specialists in white lab coats.
IBM dominated this era with the System/360, announced in 1964. These machines weren't cheap: the entry-level Model 30 started at $133,000 (about $1.3 million today), while high-end configurations could run several million dollars. Most companies didn't even buy them—they rented them, paying thousands per month.
But mainframes introduced a crucial concept: time-sharing. At MIT, Professor Fernando Corbató's team built the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) in 1961, allowing multiple users to share a single computer simultaneously through remote terminals. Instead of submitting punch cards and waiting hours for results, users could type commands and get responses in real-time.
This was the original "server"—a central computer serving multiple clients. The economics were simple: computers were expensive, so you shared them.
The Web Is Born
Fast forward to 1989. At CERN in Switzerland, a British scientist named Tim Berners-Lee proposed a system for sharing documents using hypertext. By December 1990, he had built the first web server on his NeXT workstation—essentially a fancy desktop computer sitting on his desk.
The machine famously bore a hand-written label: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!"
This wasn't some massive data center operation. It was one computer, on one desk, serving pages to anyone who connected. And that simplicity was the point—the web was designed so that anyone could participate, both as a reader and a publisher.
Everyone Gets a Homepage
By the mid-1990s, the web was exploding. Apache (released in 1995) gave anyone a free, capable web server. PHP (also 1995, created by Rasmus Lerdorf to manage his online résumé) made dynamic pages simple. Combined with MySQL and Linux, this "LAMP stack" powered an enormous portion of the early web.
Platforms like GeoCities (1994) and Tripod (1995) let millions of people create their first websites—complete with under-construction GIFs and guestbooks. GeoCities organized sites into "neighborhoods" like Hollywood for entertainment fans or WallStreet for business pages. By late 1995, they were signing up thousands of new "Homesteaders" daily.
Meanwhile, startups were building the future in garages and dorm rooms. Google's first production server? Larry Page and Sergey Brin built it at Stanford in 1996, housing ten 4GB hard drives in a cabinet made of LEGO bricks. Sometimes innovation looks a little homemade.
The Hosting Industry Emerges
Not everyone wanted to babysit their own hardware. Shared hosting emerged as the first abstraction layer: companies would rent you space on a server alongside hundreds of other customers.
This worked for simple sites, but the limitations were real. All those sites shared CPU, memory, and disk. If your neighbor's blog got popular, your site slowed down. You had no root access and were stuck with whatever software the host provided.
Virtual Private Servers (VPS) emerged in the late 1990s as the answer. Companies like Linode (founded 2003) offered something compelling: a virtualized slice of a physical server that felt like your own machine. Root access, your choice of software, guaranteed resources—without buying hardware.
The Cloud Arrives
In 2006, Amazon launched Amazon Web Services with S3 for storage (March) and EC2 for compute (August). The pitch was simple: rent servers by the hour. Need more capacity? Spin up instances. Traffic dies down? Shut them off.
This was genuinely transformative. Startups no longer needed to buy servers upfront. You could launch a company with a laptop and a credit card. Instagram scaled to millions of users on AWS before being acquired for $1 billion with just 13 employees.
Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and others followed. The cloud had arrived, and it promised to make infrastructure someone else's problem.
The Complexity Spiral
But something happened as the cloud matured. What started as "rent a server" evolved into an overwhelming ecosystem.
AWS alone now offers over 200 services. Want to deploy a web application? You might find yourself choosing between EC2, ECS, EKS, Fargate, Lambda, App Runner, Lightsail, or Elastic Beanstalk—and that's just compute. Add databases, caching, CDN, DNS, load balancing, secrets management, logging, monitoring...
Microservices architecture promised resilience and scalability, but it also meant a simple web request might bounce through dozens of containers across multiple regions, orchestrated by Kubernetes clusters that required their own specialists to operate.
The joke became that you need a full-time engineer just to understand your AWS bill.
For Netflix serving billions of requests globally, this complexity might be justified. For your side project? Probably not.
The Simplicity Renaissance
Around 2020, developers started pushing back. A few things converged:
Hardware got cheaper. A $5/month VPS from DigitalOcean or Hetzner packs more power than those million-dollar mainframes of the 1960s.
Tools got better. The Rails team released Kamal (originally called MRSK), making it easy to deploy applications to simple VPS instances with Docker. Projects like Coolify offered self-hosted alternatives to Heroku.
Free tiers disappeared. When Heroku killed its free tier in November 2022, thousands of developers suddenly needed to think about hosting differently. Many discovered that a simple VPS was cheaper and more capable than they'd assumed.
Voices got louder. DHH and the 37signals team documented running Basecamp and HEY for millions of users on a handful of servers. The message: you probably don't need auto-scaling across three regions. A well-configured server (or two) might be plenty.
Developers started asking: what if we've been overcomplicating things?
The Personal Server
Which brings us to today, and an idea that's been quietly gaining traction:
What if everyone had their own server?
Not a shared hosting account. Not a labyrinth of cloud services. A real server—always on, connected to the internet, yours to configure however you want.
This isn't as radical as it sounds. The earliest web was built exactly this way. Tim Berners-Lee's NeXT workstation was a personal server. Those GeoCities pages were hosted on shared infrastructure, sure, but they represented the dream of everyone being able to publish.
The difference now is that the tools have caught up. Managing a server no longer requires deep systems expertise. AI can help with the operational complexity that used to demand specialists. And modern hardware is remarkably capable—a server costing less per month than a coffee can handle serious traffic.
We're building Zo Computer around this idea: that everyone should have access to their own server, made simple enough that you don't need to be a sysadmin to use it.
Full Circle
The history of servers traces a fascinating arc:
1960s: Computing is expensive—share it on mainframes 1990s: The web makes serving simple—anyone can do it 2000s: Operations are hard—let platforms handle it 2010s: Cloud scales everything—embrace the complexity 2020s: Wait, this is too complicated—maybe simplicity was right all along?
We're at an interesting moment. The pendulum is swinging back toward simpler deployments, personal ownership, and the idea that you don't need a distributed system for most problems.
Modern servers can outperform those room-sized mainframes of the 1960s. The tools to manage them have gotten dramatically better. And maybe—just maybe—it's time for everyone to have their own server again.
Curious what you can do with your own server? Check out our guide: What's a server?